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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 



BOOKS BY 

flDars IS. Mailer 



THE WOOD-CARVER OF 'LYMPUS 

A DAUGHTER OF THE RICH 

THE LITTLE CITIZEN 

SANNA OF THE ISLAND TOWN 

A YEAR OUT OF LIFE 

FLAMSTED QUARRIES 

A CRY IN THE WILDERNESS 

FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

MY RAGPICKER 

THROUGH THE GATES OF THE 

NETHERLANDS 
OUR BENNY 



FROM AN 
ISLAND OUTPOST 



BY 



MARY E. WALLER 

AUTHOR OF "THE WOOD-CARVER OF 'LYMPUS," "A CRY IN 
THE WILDERNESS," " FLAMSTED QUARRIES," ETC. 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1914 



.A 57 



Copyright, 1914, 
By Mary E. Waller. 



All rights reset ved 



Published, April, 1914 



APR -6 1914 



Setup and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A. 



<AT 



•CI.A371221 



Go 

DR. JOHN SHACKFORD GROUARD 

OF 

THE ISLAND OUTPOST 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Arrival i 

II. By Wireless n 

III. Beach Plum Jelly and Some Practical 

Deductions 26 

IV. Roots, Subsoil, and Landed Estates . 34 
V. The "Pass" 59 

VI. Outlook 71 

VII. Certain Moods of the Moors ... 91 

VIII. My Mail 102 

IX. A Literary Molokai 127 

X. By Way of Contrast 142 

XI. At the Edge of the World . . . . 157 

XII. A Private View 165 

XIII. The Winds 176 

XIV. Little Gardens by the Sea .... 188 
XV. Low Tides 206 

XVI. High Tides 231 

XVII. Searchlights 249 

XVIII. The Gulls and Aviation 269 

XIX. Deep-sea Soundings 274 

XX. Beacons 295 



FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 



ARRIVAL 

As work interpreting life has taught me, as life sus- 
tained by work has given me. 

I. 

September, 1909. 

My first breathing spell in nine years ; and 
during these nine years I have worked steadily, 
like a dray-horse, in the harness of necessity. 
Not once in all these years has that necessity 
loosened so much as a check-rein, — and there 
has been much uphill work, — to ease me 
mercifully till to-day. 

No wonder I am sitting here in the kitchen of 
this island home, half-dazed, partly numb, and 
wholly dumb save for the sound of this pencil 
moving over the paper. I look out against a 



2 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

blank of dense, white fog that curtains the one 
window. What is beyond it ? 

The boat on which we came was late. The 
weather was so thick she was forced to feel her 
way into the harbor. The wharf was ghostly ; 
the small crowd of people on it mere phantoms ; 
the streets apparently deserted, and the border- 
ing trees loomed fantastic in the mist. What a 
night to arrive, unknowing and unknown, on this 
Island Outpost in the Atlantic ! 

2. 
I have been getting my bearings this first 
morning. The fog has lifted. To the south, 
west, north, are billowing moors. They lie 
uniformly dun beneath the unbroken gray of 
low-hanging skies and, undefined in outline, 
blend with them at the horizon. 

3- 

I was up early and away to the moors just 
beyond the house. I found I was in a world 
of strange and wonderful perspective, for I 
looked out on a gently undulating sea of varied 



ARRIVAL 3 

green and brown grasses, necked here and there 
with the foam of the wild carrot blossoms. In 
the foreground a flock of small, gray, white- 
breasted birds was flying restlessly and songless 
from green crest to brown crest, rising at inter- 
vals with a curiously uncertain swing to soar 
into the brooding gray depths above them. 

I recognize their mood, that of ante-migra- 
tion : restless, songless, transiently homeless. 
Many humans experience this. I know that I 
have more than once. 

4- 

On this third day the sun is shining. I have 
been out on the moors again this afternoon and 
I find myself in another world, a world of spa- 
cious light and marvellous nuance of neutral 
tints : soft grays, warm browns, dark greens 
underflushed with a hint of red in the huckle- 
berry patches. As I stood on one of the higher 
swells, the spirit of me suddenly felt untram- 
melled, free to breathe great breaths in the spa- 
cious lightness of the softly moving air. Below 
me the crooked moorland road, rutted deep in 



4 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

sand, led to the town. The huddle of gray roofs 
and stacks of gray, deep-throated chimneys 
shone silver gray in the clear sunshine. 

5- 

One of the untranslatable September days. 
It is impossible to render its effect on body, 
mind, and soul, either in words, colors, or tones. 
For the time being one may absorb infinity in 
the intersecting planes of thought, tone, color; 
but the word that would translate, the land- 
scape that would picture, the harmony that 
would reveal, are mere circumscribed instru- 
mentation for its expression. Still, circum- 
scribed as are our powers, we can reach certain 
interpretations. I find suggestions of such a 
day as this in one of Homer Martin's landscapes, 
in two lines from Lanier's "Hymns of the 
Marshes", in an adaptation, or rather, I should 
say, in an interpretation by Tschaikowsky of a 
"Prayer" by Mozart. 

6. 
I have taken my first drive this afternoon. 
I went about five miles towards the one-time 



ARRIVAL 5 

fishing hamlet of 'Sconset. The perspective 
of the long, yellowish white road was lost in 
haze. To the right the moors darkened into 
an expanse of dwarfed pines ; to the left the 
dull red of the cranberry bogs filled a great 
hollow, hundreds of acres in extent. On its 
farthermost edge the blue-gray smoke from 
burning peat-stacks trailed with scarcely per- 
ceptible motion out to sea. 

As I looked, I was aware of a sudden blur- 
ring of the daylight ; without warning, a tidal 
wave of fog rolled in from the Atlantic. In 
a moment everything loomed gigantic; all 
dimensions were indeterminate. Then I felt 
a cool, refreshing moisture on my face, and all 
around and above was blotted out save for a 
strip of the yellowish white road before me. 

I turned homewards and faced a blank ; 
only the road, like the straight line of duty, 
was visible a little way ahead. 

7- 
This old house, gray and weather-beaten, is 
an architectural freak. One half of the first 



6 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

floor is only one room deep, but that depth 
is fully forty feet, or rather, I may say, it is 
seven miles deep ! For from its four eastern 
windows there is a harbor extension of miles 
to the "haulover". As I sit at the dining- 
table I look out and down over gray roofs, 
huge, square, gray chimneys, over marshy 
meadows bordered by a line of young willows, 
and between bites I may see the trim yachts 
at anchor, the old collier-schooners making 
slow sail to the wharves, the daily steamer 
rounding the Point, or the fleet of fishing boats 
tacking irregularly across the Upper Harbor. 

8. 
Sometimes I find myself wondering where 
I am. Not in America, I say to myself. There 
is more than a hint of some of the fishing vil- 
lages of the Scotch coast of the North Sea — 
Newhaven, for instance. It needs only the 
appearance of those transplanted Scandinavian 
fishwives, with their amplitude of short skirts, 
their bare arms akimbo, their creels of fish, to 
convince me I am far more than thirty miles 



ARRIVAL 7 

away from the continent of America. What a 
swing they have, those fishwives of Newhaven ! 
What a superb carriage : head erect, shoulders 
and back flat, lithe hips, sturdy calves, and a 
stride of thirty inches ! I can hear their reso- 
nant voices crying, "Caller herring". 

9- 

I went down town to-day to hire a carpenter, 
buy some provisions, make acquaintance with 
the trades-people, and try to begin to feel at 
home. And what a town it is, with its glint of 
bright harbor waters down the vista of the elm- 
shaded main street that slopes to the east, and 
its magical moorland glimpses from every sur- 
prising turn and twist of lane and alley, of high- 
way, cliff, and shore ! 

I must set about making my old house com- 
fortable, wholly livable-in, and as lovable as I 
can for the long winter before us. 

10. 

It was well for me that a series of south- 
west rain-storms set in last week, otherwise 



8 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

this house would not have been settled for two 
months. 

My ample, forty-foot living-and-dining-room 
in one is satisfactory. I have lighted the fire 
on the hearth this evening and drawn the cur- 
tains close. The room has the look of a white- 
painted cabin of a ship. Near the door that 
opens into the narrow hall the ceiling is sup- 
ported by a curious eight-sided pillar with a 
Byzantine capital ! Now, however did that 
thought find its way to this particular house 
on this particular island ? 

It looked familiar. I knew I had seen it 
somewhere long before in my mind's eye ; it 
took about the ten-thousandth part of a second 
to place it. Elizabeth of German Garden fame 
reports one like it in her home. I have utilized 
it by having a few octagonal shelves built around 
it for my books. I unpacked them to-day and 
put them in their wonted places. They make a 
brave showing and add both cheer and color. 
I say "wonted" because I always give my books 
congenial companions. 

This particular post-bookrack is filled with 



ARRIVAL 9 

what appears to be a hodge-podge of lives, 
autobiographies, poems, memorials, letters, 
dramas, books of travel — yet what good fel- 
lowship is among them ! 

Ferns fill a western window; and here and 
there in a window hanging, a chair cushion, in 
my writing-pad, I have added a touch of color : 
fine Venetian red. All about are the things 
— our New England word for special posses- 
sions — with which I have lived ever since I 
knew the meaning of "things". 

There is little space on the low walls for 
my pictures, for the great room has eleven 
windows looking to the east, north, west, and 
four doors, one of which opens on a large porch 
facing the harbor. However, I have hung in 
the vacant places some old engravings which 
have become a part of my life, — have, indeed, 
influenced it largely in certain directions be- 
cause I have lived with them since my child- 
hood. One, above the narrow mantel over 
the fireplace, is the "Boston and its Harbor", 
the proof, from the drawing by Hill. It has 
the true Turnerian atmospheric effects in its 



io FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

skies. I can recall no painting of town or 
city in foreign lands one half as beautiful to me 
as this picture, not even Vermeer's "View of 
Delft" in the Mauritshuis at the Hague; for, 
beyond the harbor, it shows me the city of my 
birth, the familiar spires of Park Street and the 
Old South, of the Old North Church and, across 
the Charles, the shaft of Bunker Hill. It is 
all my own, my Boston ; therefore I love it. 
Beneath it on the same narrow mantel are my 
"Carlyle ivies". 

And here I sit in the lamplight and firelight, 
thirty miles at sea, happily idle for a time, 
listening to the rush of rain against the windows 
and to the beneficent winds from the Atlantic, 
moisture-laden, that, bearing in from their 
wide ocean haunts, seem to cut great swaths of 
sound in their sweep over the moors. 



II 



BY WIRELESS 
I. 

It clears tardily after the week of rain and 
fog. From an old churchyard on the moors 
I watched to-night for the setting of the sun. 
An unbroken wall of slate-colored cloud rounded 
the horizon and extended nearly to the zenith. 
The moors lay dark beneath it ; no shifting 
line of light, no ray of brightness anywhere 
visible. There was no wind. Suddenly, with- 
out the herald of a change, in the horizon's 
west, the dark gray cloud-postern burned as 
with the incandescent head of a huge battering- 
ram, and the sun, vastly dilated, distorted, 
glowed rayless in the breach for the space of 
ten seconds as it sank. 

That cloud-wall reflected no more light than 
if it had been made of asphalt. I could but 

ii 



12 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

wonder if its breadth extended halfway to the 
Bahamas, if its depth touched the rarefied 
regions of the upper air. 

The dusk fell ; it seemed only the engulfing 
of day in that cloud. In the moorland bury- 
ing-ground the ancient headstones, aslant, 
showed ghostly gray. 

As I turned homewards I caught a wireless 
message from over the ocean. Clear and 
definite it was, for in the darkness the trans- 
mission is better than by daylight. I inter- 
preted and visualized it. The time, the place, 
started the current; in the fractional part of a 
second I am afar — in Italy ; in Florence, on 
the hill overlooking it, by the church of San 
Miniato, just at sunset, among the many graves 
in the long grass. 

Beneath me lies the beloved City deep in 
the chalice of the surrounding hills touched at 
the moment with amethyst; its dome, turrets, 
bell-towers, upreaching from the purple mists 
of Arno like the exquisite pistil and stamens of 
a flower. 

The old church and the hill whereon it stands 



BY WIRELESS 13 

are still radiant in the light of the sun just sink- 
ing below the horizon. The graves are half 
hidden among the long grass that undulates 
softly in the gentle but steady wind. On each 
grave is a tiny lantern. I wait there till they 
are lighted, a few minutes after sundown. Oh, 
those many, many little grave-lights on the hill 
of San Miniato ! How they twinkle and flash 
from their lowly quiet among the waving grass 
as the breeze swings them to and fro ! To me, 
they are like the happy greetings of earth- 
revisiting souls. I know they will twinkle there 
till Mount Morello shall herald the coming dawn. 

The sudden clash and clang of a hundred 
bells breaks the evening quiet, up-pealing so 
insouciantly — there is no other word for the 
manner of their ringing — to the darkening 
heights. Those garrulous brazen tongues never 
let us forget where we are : in Italy. . . . 

Their echoes had scarcely ceased as I entered 
the town again and heard the old Portuguese 
bell in the tower of the South Church on Orange 
Street striking seven and calling me — home. 

Yes ; Italy is one of the great passions of 



i 4 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

life. It is full of effulgent heights, mist-filled 
depths, ecstasy of unrest, subduing charm, all- 
abandoning devotion. Its spell is binding even 
in absence. 

And what a contrast is this little gray town 
afar on the island outpost of our United States ! 
Its windows overlook the billowing moors and 
the infinite-reaching wastes of the Atlantic. 
How it draws, draws quietly, insistently, irre- 
sistibly to the low hearthstones and open 
fires in its homes both humble and stately. 
How it attracts with the enduring power of a 
lifelong wedded love that finds at the fireside 
of home its necessary sustenance; seeks there 
its refuge ; finds there — sanctuary. 

Now, at nine, even while I am writing, the 
old Portuguese bell is ringing curfew. I'll 
match its tone against the best in Europe. . . . 

I have just been out on the porch to listen and 
watch in the blackness of this dark night. I 
heard the continuous tolling of the bell on the 
buoy beyond the jetties. I watched the con- 
tinuous wax and wane of the great beacon light 
miles away across the moors on Sankaty Head. 



BY WIRELESS 15 

2. 

I've been thinking about those "earth-revisit- 
ing souls" and their "happy greetings" I men- 
tioned. I certainly did not write that as a 
figure of speech. They really seemed such to 
me at that time. 

I recall, however, one special visit to the 
Medici Chapel, where my thought was quite 
otherwise in the presence of the Master's works : 
the titanic Twilight, Dawn, Night, and the 
unfinished Day. And I wonder, recalling that 
visit — I wonder, and I wonder ; and, with all 
my wondering, being no nearer to any satis- 
faction, I have imagined Michael Angelo revis- 
iting that same Medici Chapel three hundred 
years after his death to see his unfinished work. 

And now I find myself wondering again if by 
any possibility I may have imagined rightly ? — 

In the Medici Chapel at Twilight 

Michael Angelo loquitur. 

What ! Sleeping still, 
Mute, pallid offspring of my art? The Chapel's dim, 
I scarce know them apart ; but, by the turn of limb, 



16 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

I'm sure the Night is here and over there the Dawn. 
(My marble poppies — potent charm !) Three centuries 

gone 
And Italy, they say, reborn ! 

Still waking, Day, 
As ever and for always to new greed for gain ? 
To strife for rights ? — Chimera of a dullard's brain ! 
We both — mark well — have wrestled with the thing 

called Fame 
As Jacob with the angel till it — shall I tell ? — 
Had like to prove a blessed curse that smacked of hell. 

Imprisoned Day, thou'rt still in thine unfinished strength ; 
As yet no master's hand hath given these limbs repose. 
Can it be true that after me — be humble, Heart ! — 
Not one has dared to shape this rugged, rough-hewn 

length ? 
And does this prove that only he may reap who sows, 
Though centuries intervene ? I speak as one who knows. 
Earth-memories stir within me but to bring earth-pain. 
Yea, Heaven is Heaven ; alas, I know that all full well ; 
But earth, my earth, and life and love, and art, my art — 
O God, that I might live again ! 

No solution — this. 

3- 

I am reading the "Memorials of Edward 
Burne-Jones". I like group reading. Some 
books induce it. I know I shall reach out 



BY WIRELESS 17 

through this to so many of his time — Morris, 
Rossetti, Carlyle and Ruskin, dear old Ben- 
venuto Cellini, Malory and Fiona Macleod. 

This book, for instance, is like the central 
sun of some great nebula ; the central thought 
surrounds itself at once with groups of associated 
beauty as it is conceived in all the arts, in life, 
and letters. 

I have laid the book aside for a few minutes, 
taken my writing-pad, and am jotting down, 
just as a matter of curiosity, the readings 
from the waves of my wireless, induced by a 
half hour spent with this book. 

Thomas Carlyle is mentioned with loving 
reference, — Carlyle, for many years my priest 
and prophet. I look at his ivies in their clay 
pots on the narrow shelf above the fireplace. 
They are as green and thrifty as if they had never 
been transplanted from their native soil in that 
small backyard — it is nothing more pretentious 
than that — of a certain old house in Cheyne 
Row in Chelsea Town. Carlyle's ivies, their 
roots mulched and watered, perhaps, by the 
Sage when he and Tennyson, those two Niagaras 



1 8 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

of prose and poetry, sat speechless, pipe in mouth, 
in that same backyard one summer night, and 
at parting congratulated themselves on the 
pleasant evening they had passed together ! 

Yes, they are thriving here on this island in 
the Atlantic. They have suffered no sea change ; 
every leaf recalls the unpretentious house and 
my pilgrimage to it. I went as to a Mecca. 

There is mention, also, of the portrait of 
Gladstone's baby grandchild; and again my 
wireless is at work. 

I am in Hawarden Church, looking at the 
Burne-Jones memorial window. Some laborers 
are digging in the churchyard ; a mason is at 
work resetting some stones in the chancel. 
The sky is overcast. I see the sign of the old 
hostelry, the Glynn Arms, swinging in the high 
wind. I see the curving, gray, village street, 
typical of Wales, and, as I take my stand at its 
farther end, by the ancient pump beneath an 
ivy-draped garden wall, I see a girl swing past 
on her bicycle. She is bareheaded ; the long, 
bright curls are tossed on the wind. Her face 
is like those of which the Pre-Raphaelite Brother- 



BY WIRELESS 19 

hood dreamed in order to visualize and im- 
mortalize. 

Afterwards I find it reproduced in one of the 
tiny shop windows hard by the inn, and I know 
it to be that of the Master of Hawarden's 
granddaughter — a face which, had Burne- 
Jones known it in its blossoming womanhood, 
would have enriched the world of art through 
the medium of another of his incomparable 
angels. 

I am in the Glynn Arms, ordering tea and 
toast and the inn's best jam. I shall never 
taste its like again ; I have tried in vain to 
imitate it here at home. It was, rather, a 
plum conserve and delectable with crisp, hot 
toast. I am sitting in the low, dark-ceiled 
front room, listening to the scurrying wind till 
the light begins to fade through the low case- 
ment. . . . 

I am thinking now of that late afternoon, 
the ancient, gray Welsh village, the fading 
light, the clouded sky ; and I see but one ray 
of brightness in all of it — the wholly radiant 
face of that girl. 



20 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

4- 

October. 

I like to explore this old town when it is en- 
wrapped in light mists. There is no fog. The 
water is visible, but softly veiled. Every out- 
line of hull and rigging, of wharf and ware- 
house, of shore and lighthouse is softened. Of 
angles there are none. Every lane has its dim 
perspective ; every road its charmingly indefi- 
nite limitations of turning. Either nothing 
leaves off where everything begins, or all objects 
are mere suggestions where they should be defi- 
nite somethings. Everywhere there is pleas- 
ing vagueness, but never vacuity. 

5- 
I was walking in an unexplored south quarter 
of the town when I came upon a road that, 
apparently, ended on an upland of the moors, 
and crowning the grass slope was the old wind- 
mill in the mist, gray in gray. There was no 
movement about or above me, on the ground or 
in the air ; neither bird nor beast was abroad 
at that moment, in that place. There was 



BY WIRELESS 21 

only the mist, and the mill, and the climbing 
moorland road and I alone in it. 

I held my breath for an instant that the silent 
charm might not be broken ; that another 
vision, which the sensitive brain films had kept 
intact for this hour, this minute, this infini- 
tesimal part of a second, might materialize in 
thought. Oh, the marvellous law of associa- 
tion and its results ! On my retina was the 
image of the old Nantucket windmill in the 
mist — that and the climbing road. And simul- 
taneously with the striking of the waves of 
reflected light on the sensitive nerves, the 
message went forth through the million intricate 
brain cells, and lo ! — I am aware of another 
windmill in the mist, but afar on the coast of 
France, on the shores of Boulogne. I see it 
between two dim uplands, and it crowns the 
whitish gray road that climbs between them. 
So I saw it seven years ago. 

6. 

Heigh-ho for the salt island-marshes ! 
Heigh-ho for the salt winds that are sweeping 



22 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

over them ! And hey for the salt-hay-laden 
wains and the horses straining to their task ! 

I have been on the point all this afternoon, 
on a level with the sea and the wondrous- 
tinted marshes that it feeds. I have been 
watching the hay-making on the salt meadows ; 
watching the incoming tide slowly fill the little 
creeks till they gleamed all rounded, sinuous, 
jewelled as with chrysoprase, jasper, topaz, 
in their deep setting of reeds. Wireless again. 
For at sight of .the eel grass and the slowly 
filling creeks, I am a child once more and dis- 
covering the wonderland of Cape Cod. 

7- 
On a lift of the moors just beyond the old 
windmill are some ancient thorn trees. This 
evening, after the sun set clear, cloudless, and 
before the earth shadow fell, the horizon where 
the moors seam it with purple was defined by a 
broad zone of red gold, flawless as the ancient 
priceless lacquer of Japan. Against it my 
three thorn trees, gnarled, wind-bent, every 
branch and twig weirdly reticulated, stood out- 



BY WIRELESS 23 

lined in black. — Why do I need to see Japan 
after this ? 

8. 

There is no use in my attempting to finish 
settling the house in such weather. Yesterday 
an old trustworthy horse and I rambled over 
eastwards ; rambled is the word, for we wandered 
hither and thither, through and around, and, 
finally, over Saul's Hills — the section of the 
island lying between the harbor and Sankaty 
Head. 

Hills, moors, ocean lay open to the October 
sun. A pond gleamed like an opal in the deep 
hollow of the moors, the motionless waters 
reflecting the brilliant red of huckleberry bushes, 
the brown-green of the bayberry, the deep blue 
of the sky, and one tiny cloud-plume. 

As I came out on Sankaty Head I faced — 
Eternity. 

The sunshine was that bottled vintage of 
mid-summer which nature lays aside for three 
months, only to pour out in libation as a mellow 
golden cordial on just such an October day. 
The sun had wheeled a degree from the meridian. 



24 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

In the south the ocean lay pale, blue, clear, to 
the horizon's rim ; but eastwards and before 
me — what was before me ? I cannot tell. It 
seemed to me as if I were having one long, 
long look into that Mystery of Mysteries in 
which all life lives, moves, and has its being; 
into which we humans gaze with straining eyes, 
mutely questioning; through which we, the 
Unknowing, pass with faltering sight into the 
Unknown. 

I stood on the very edge of the high head and 
gazed long into the fathomless, translucent 
mist of tenderest blue that lay upon an ocean of 
constantly changing, but veiled cerulean. This 
marvellous mist veiled yet revealed, was pene- 
trable but baffling; it secreted, yet divulged. 
There was no dividing line of color to mark 
sea, atmosphere, or sky. Mist, water, and firma- 
ment blended with such ethereal gradations 
of tints and to such wonderful depths above, 
beneath, and before me, that the mere physical 
reception of the reflected light-waves, in their 
soft intensity, produced a sensuous joy as well 
as a spiritual exaltation. 



BY WIRELESS 25 

And here again the wireless of the brain was 
at work. As I marvelled at that color, I saw 
in it the wondrous blue of the Alpine gentian 
I picked years ago from beside the snows on 
the pass of the Simplon. I heard the surging 
elemental waves of harmony in the overture to 
Wagner's "Rhinegold". I caught one chord, 
distinctly, from MacDowell's "Mid-Ocean" — 
and I saw the reed-measured sapphire of the 
foundation of the new City of God. 

And that which lay before me symbolized to 
me the creative power that has made these 
five things possible. 

Oh, what are words ! Mere blasphemies for 
such an experience, for such a day. . . . 



Ill 



BEACH PLUM JELLY AND SOME PRACTICAL 
DEDUCTIONS 

I. 

I made some beach plum jelly this morning; 
it is the thing to do at this season in Nantucket. 
It was a failure. Although it was firm and clear 
the taste was not right. I must try again. 

I wonder how women get on who have not 
these common things of life to interest them ? 

Making jellies and jams, preserving and pic- 
kling, is a process always stimulating to me — I 
ought to add when it does not prove dishearten- 
ing as in the present case. There is always 
the delightful factor of chance in it; the "turn- 
ing out well" is a real cause for rejoicing; 
the failure is, of course, a proportionate dis- 
appointment, and failure with things that are 
of the "earth earthy" is so deadening to the 
spirit ! 

26 



BEACH PLUM JELLY AND DEDUCTIONS 27 

It is really remarkable the total depravity, 
at times, of concurrent circumstance when I 
am preserving — peaches, for instance. Now 
putting up peaches looks on the surface to be an 
ordinary and one-sided operation, voted pro- 
saic by a host of women ; but viewed from the 
various points of the weather status, of growth, 
quality, distance from orchards, venalities of 
marketmen and shippers (oh, that deceptive 
red netting !), express companies, and one's 
own mood at the time of preserving, it becomes 
a curiously complex affair. 

Sometimes when a guest sits at my table in 
mid-winter, enjoying those same peaches with 
a "topping" — our New England word — of 
whipped cream and expressing satisfaction with 
the dish, I think to myself : 

"Little you are realizing what goes to the mak- 
ing of these delectables ! — sun, rain, the dropped 
kernel, the earth-mother with her * will to yield ', 
the tending by human hands, the watching by 
human eyes for cloud or clearing and the fore- 
cast of weather bureau ; the kindling of bon- 
fires if the frost fall ; the careful picking, selec- 



28 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

tion, packing, shipping ; the sea voyage to this 
distant island ; the sorting and paring ; the 
making of syrup from the largess of the fields of 
Louisiana, Hawaii, or the distant Philippines ; 
the testing, doing, tasting; the sterilizing of 
jars, and, at last, the sealing!" All these 
processes are the factors in the making of my 
two dozen jars of peach preserve plus the day's 
mood of the woman who is "doing them up" 
and the state of the weather. 

With all this interweaving of elements and 
mechanics, there is always the possibility of an 
infinitesimal mould-growth — enfant du diable 
for us housekeepers — to ruin all my first at- 
tempt, and the woful prospect of my having to 
"do them over", a very penance for my house- 
wife's soul. Well, if my guest, man or woman, 
say five months afterwards, "How delicious !" 
I have my reward. 

2. 

Ah, these common things of life ! What 
balance, what poise they give us when we are 
forced to breast alone the overwhelming flood 
of adverse circumstance ! Who shall say what 



BEACH PLUM JELLY AND DEDUCTIONS 29 

thoughts, what high resolves, what memories, 
what dogged persistence in undertaking, what 
courage of the pour-on-I-will-endure kind, what 
undaunted valor of soul that endures the gnawing 
and tearing of physical pain at the very vitals, 
are component parts of these myriad common 
things of life that go to the making of the normal 
whole ? 

How many indignant protests against tyranny 
in the home and injustice from the world in 
general have women kneaded into bread ? How 
many sorrows, how many joys, are set with every 
stitch of a mother's sewing ? How many curses, 
solid if harmless, are nailed fast upon some 
unsuspecting offender with every tack a house- 
keeper puts into an old "turned" carpet? 
How many cobwebs of the brain are cleared 
away with the sweeping of a room ? Only 
women can tell, and preeminently those women 
who know from experience the everlasting sal- 
vation latent in just the common things of life. 

And of the women who do not know them, or, 
knowing, ignore their existence, ignore the fact 
that they have been, are, and always will be living 



30 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

daily benefactions, physical, moral, spiritual ? 
There is little to be said, for the result is ever 
before our eyes. Nature's law of compensation 
works through these common things of life ; 
to ignore them, to cease to make ourselves one 
with them, is to invite disaster. 

"Occupation treatment" whereby men and 
women are set to work that the lost balance may 
be, if possible, restored — this obtains every- 
where in our present times. That which in 
the following of a great natural law keeps life 
at the normal is now artificially reproduced, in 
order to induce the same result in the abnormal 
cases that are multiplying because of the igno- 
rance of just these common things of life. 

Yes, set to work ; and we find men and women 
weaving on hand-looms as of old; we find men 
and women chopping wood, like the pioneers 
of old; we see men and women working in clay, 
making pottery like all primitive peoples. 

If this be not a signpost for future generations 
then he who runs and does not read is blind. 

They are a part of our commonwealth, this 
wealth which you and I and all those who have 



BEACH PLUM JELLY AND DEDUCTIONS 31 

two eyes with which to see, two ears with which 
to hear, who have smell, touch, taste, hold in 
common. Through each sense we own a world, 
a wonder-world. Yet men and women, un- 
heeding the richness of such possessions, dare 
call themselves "poor" because, forsooth, they 
have no strong box filled with gilt-edged securi- 
ties ! 

There is need for a readjustment of the terms 
of life, not philosophy, in this our generation. 
There is need for a readjustment of values ; 
for a spiritual as well as a physical revaluation 
of our possessions in this America of ours. 
We are met at every turn, in every phase of 
our national life, with the material fact of " riches 
versus wealth" and the consequent confusion 
of standards. We need standards that shall 
be recognized by every eye and, what is more, 
we need standard-bearers. 'This is the great 
spiritual need of our times. 

3. 
My beach plum jelly having proved a dismal 
failure, I betook myself this afternoon westward 



32 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

to Maddequet where, I am told, they grow 
abundantly. 

Westward to Maddequet with the sun still 
high in the heavens ! And how far toward 
Maddequet did I get in this shining October 
weather ? I wandered hither and thither and 
yon and, at last, mounted a swell of the moors to 
look about me — 

Were you ever on the coast of Sicily beyond 
Messina ? 

On my right was the pond, Wannacomet, a 
sparkling pale blue, like the Montana sapphire. 
Before me lay Capaum among the low dunes 
splotched with masses of bayberry and gray 
moss ; by some trick of reflected light its color 
at that moment was amethyst. The long 
irregular line of coast, white with bleached 
hummock grass, gleamed sharply against the 
dark blue waters of the Sound. — No picking of 
beach plums to-day ! 

Through my two eyes of what unexpected 
wealth have I recently come into possession : 
this billowing moorland sea lying soundless 
beneath the brilliant sunshine of late October ! 



BEACH PLUM JELLY AND DEDUCTIONS 33 

They fascinate me — these moors. They are 
unlike any I have seen : the Liineburg Heath, 
the dunes of Holland, or Cape Cod, the country 
west of Cleve, the Scotch moors ; these have 
undeniable charm, but not that of the Nan- 
tucket moorlands. 



IV 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 
I. 

A charming woman of seventy-six, a gentle- 
woman of the old school (the "new school" 
will produce what at seventy-six ? I can but 
wonder), was one of the first to call on me and 
bid me welcome to her island. I write "her" 
advisedly, for she was born here as were her 
father and father's fathers to the sixth genera- 
tion. She was as much a part of the island as 
are its moors. 

I met her afterwards in her own house, one 
of the island's stately homes, a fit setting for 
its mistress. She spoke of her father and 
mother and showed me their portraits ; then 
she brought to my notice a large photograph 
of an old English house in one of the Channel 
coast counties. "I was born at Z , " she 

34 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 35 

said, mentioning one of the old island families, 
"and I trace my descent in a straight line for 
a thousand years from the original owners of 
this manor." 

The statement was an astounding one to me. 
A thousand years ! I made no answer. I was 
not capable of a fitting one at that moment. 
I was prepared for a Revolutionary ancestry, 
for one dating from the Mayflower, the old 
Colony days, or from Huguenot, Dutch, or 
Spaniard, what you will among our heteroge- 
neous pioneers — but a thousand years ! 

Why, Norman William had not then set foot 
on that other island across the ocean, Leif 
Ericsson made no voyage to Vinland. The 
sequoias of the Sierras were still in their first 
prime and standing sentinel over an undis- 
covered continent. The great Saxon Alfred 
was a contemporary of her many times removed 
grandfathers ! And here before me in the 
flesh, on a bit of terminal moraine of the last 
great ice-sheet, — the island of Nantucket, — 
left like a footprint of the aeons on half-sub- 
merged shoals, stood loyal and sincere, this 



36 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, seventy-six-year-old 
descendant of the Anglo-Saxons, confronting 
me — of To-day — with her thousand years of 
ancestry ! 

For the space of a minute, Columbus seemed 
of recent birth ; then I was aware that she was 
speaking again : 

"Do you wonder that I am proud of such a 
lineage ?" 

"Indeed I do not," I answered heartily. 
She deserved indulgence, as do all of us when 
we are given insight that, in a way, we are 
what we are by reason of what untold genera- 
tions once were. 

2. 

I laughed a little under my breath at this 
harmless ancestor worship as I walked slowly 
homewards in the November twilight, a twilight 
entirely at variance with our accepted New 
England standard of the drear, dull closing 
of late November days. A golden afterglow 
was lingering beyond the moors, and against 
it my "Corot" trees — so I call the four noble 
elms on the upland slope of lawn at the head 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 37 

of Liberty Street — were etched in intricate, 
interlacing curves. All about me were lawns 
as fresh as in June, hedges as sturdily green, 
rich banks of dark glossy ivy and high brick 
garden walls behung thickly with it. Here 
and there a rose blossomed over a trellised 
porch. The wind was from the south ; it 
brought to me the sound of the surf breaking 
on the South Shore. 

3- 

If I laughed to myself while walking home 
in the luminous twilight, I was laughing at 
myself and my own need of indulgence along 
certain ancestral lines. 

It is not generally known, even among my 
intimates, that I am an extensive landed pro- 
prietor. My estates are many, of great in- 
trinsic value. ,Their revenues, although fluctu- 
ating at certain periods, are enormous. In these 
days of the new income tax inquisition, when 
that which is secret shall be laid bare under 
oath, it may be well to antedate official inquiry 
and make here and now semi-official statement 



38 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

of their value. I am wondering how my Gov- 
ernment will deal with the revenues from my 
landed properties ? 

One of my estates is duly entered in the town 
registry; a fourth of an acre, rather "less" 
than "more", — in reality it is nothing more 
than a "back yard", — on this windswept 
island. But this record is misleading for I am 
a large landed proprietor in the true meaning 
of that term. 

I never knew I had so many grandfathers, 
so many grandmothers, so many uncles and 
aunts as collaterals, until I was invited to in- 
vestigate myself in detail through my forbears 
in order that I might be eligible to the " Colonial 
Dames", for which society, by the way, I have 
never qualified. Of course, I knew in a general 
way that to the fourth and fifth generation I 
had had grandfathers ; in fact, knew their 
names. An inheritance of nearly three centuries 
in the soil of Massachusetts — to be exact, 
three hundred years in 1923 — is productive 
naturally of a large crop of ancestors. Behind 
that there are six centuries of English ancestry 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 39 

as, of course, there are for every one of our many 
millions of English descent. 

I confess the mere thought of these thousands 
of grandfathers is overwhelming, and were it 
not for the tangibility of some of their estates 
it would be unbearable and not conducive to 
lucidity. Think of them as they stand in 
written record : tanners, fishermen, mill-owners, 
men of landed estates, — "gentlemen" so called, 
— lawyers, farmers, doctors, warriors of high 
degree, servants, sheriffs, governors, soldiers, 
"goodmen", "misters", yeomen, and sailors. 
This is a prototype of the ancestry of millions 
who now inherit our America : men good, bad, 
indifferent, in the usual proportion ; poor, rich, 
or in that blessed class that has neither too 
much nor too little. Each man filled his little 
space of time in this world with whatsoever he 
had of sufficient backbone to produce, whether 
of good or ill to his fellow-men. And all, to- 
day, are an integral part of the earth-mother 
which undeniable fact establishes once for all 
our common heritage. 

With this fact hourly in evidence, it seems a 



4 o FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

pity to lose two thirds of the satisfaction of 
actual living by attempting to confine our in- 
dividual humanness within prescribed ancestral 
lines. Life is not long enough to stand on 
ceremony with ourselves and other humans on 
account of ancestors. There are so many of 
them for each of us ! 

I hold my estates from these ancestors in fee 
simple. They are mine by reason of the work- 
ings of that wonderful law : the primogeniture 
of the imagination which blessed inheritance 
the thousands of dead ancestors have contrived, 
by a combining, selecting, refining, eliminating 
process, to hand down here to me very much 
alive in this twentieth century. 

These small, gray, shingled houses, on this 
island, for instance; the wells, pumps, latch- 
strings, circular cellars ; the salt marshes, wil- 
lows, eels, eel-grass, clams, quahaugs, even the 
windmill — they are as familiar to me as if I had 
lived with them all my life ; for they recall that 
other ancestral life on the queer, physical con- 
figuration of the south coast of my native state, 
that wonderful "sand-spit": short upper arm, 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 41 

sharp elbow, long forearm, and fist doubled with 
downward pointing thumb like the Roman 
thumb at the combat in the arena eighteen hun- 
dred years ago — the wonderland of Cape Cod. 

The device above the great seal of Massa- 
chusetts is Cape Cod in outline, only reversed 
and with sword in fist. 

This side of the funny bone of the Cape's 
elbow, at present Chatham, there is an inden- 
tation of the coast : Lewis Bay. Just here on 
this bay, which did not escape the keen eye of 
Samuel de Champlain on one of his many voy- 
ages, lies Hyannis; "over eastward" Barn- 
stable and Yarmouth ; and, trending north 
along the coast, Sandwich, Plymouth, Duxbury, 
Scituate, Cambridge, Watertown, Lynn, and 
Nahant. Here, along the curve of Massa- 
chusetts Bay, from the sands of Barnstable to 
the rocks of Nahant, which unproductive penin- 
sula a far-removed grandfather bought of an 
Indian sachem for a suit of clothes, and proceeded 
thriftily to make tar from its pine trees, are to 
be found many of the roots of my special life 
in the New World. 



42 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

Not for a modern fortune would I exchange 
what the estates of these various ancestors 
have yielded me in impressions alone — those 
impressions that are "more lasting than bronze". 

4- 

To a child city born, the journey down the 
Cape in one of the slow-going, infrequent trains 
of the Old Colony line was a long, long road to 
Paradise. With the first breath from the salt 
marshes I was blissful, for I was entering a new 
world. 

The train shackled along over the rough 
roadbed. Now and then a branch of the scrub 
oak coppice brushed the side of the car. The 
sands stretched away north and south to the 
rippling blue. After a long wait at the "Nar- 
rows", the train started again in the twilight 
on its last leisurely lap for Yarmouth and 
Hyannis. Wonderful fragrances drew in through 
the car windows that were as a rule open : — 
the spice of marsh pinks, the strong, salty 
breathings of an incoming tide, the resinous 
pungency escaping from pines in the cool of 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 43 

the evening after their hot sun bath. At 
times I get it here, but never of quite the same 
commingled perfumes. Last summer I was 
sitting at one of the windows that look harbor- 
wards, and as the tide turned the sea seemed to 
breathe once, deeply ; then it sent its life-giving 
ozone over the masses of roses and honeysuckle 
in full bloom below our bank. The fragrance 
of it opened wide the sense portal of smell for 
memories of those home-goings to my grand- 
mother on the Cape. 

5- 
One of the seventeenth century Cape grand- 
fathers on the maternal side was born rich, 
inherited riches, married riches, accumulated 
riches, and died rich ; yet of true wealth he 
possessed nothing and, more is the pity, knew 
nothing of its meaning. He was just "a stingy 
old screw". Yet I am his debtor, for among 
his many investments in land he made one of a 
thousand acres in what is now Hartford County 
in Connecticut, on the Connecticut River, the 
same being, according to description, "the fifth 
lot at the crotch of the river". 



44 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

It is by virtue of those thousand acres at 
"the crotch of the river" and of another thou- 
sand near and on the Connecticut's largest 
branch, the White River in Vermont, — six 
hundred of which were deeded to a great-great- 
grandfather on the paternal side, and designated 
on the parchment as "his pitch", and four 
hundred more belonging to his son, — that I 
inherit all the beauty of the Connecticut Valley, 
that wonderful valley which lies at our doors 
yet is sought for its beauty by comparatively 
few. ; 

How many realize that this great New Eng- 
land artery has a course of nearly four hundred 
and fifty miles ? How many have ever jour- 
neyed, just for the sake of its exquisite scenery, 
— as thousands seek the Wyoming Valley of 
Pennsylvania, — from Lyme to Lyndon, we 
will say, on its Passumpsic branch in northern 
Vermont, or to Littleton in the White Hills ? 

The scenery is not spectacular, but from mouth 
to source there is constant variety and the charm 
of contrast : the gradual transition from low 
sandstone banks, populous with cities and towns, 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 45 

to the gateway of the hills and the turn of in- 
numerable mill-wheels ; from the slow, sea- 
going flood, bearing on its sluggish current sloop 
and schooner and tug from Long Island Sound, 
to rapids and falls and sharp twisting curves 
where the White and the Lower Ammonoosuc 
wind among the mountains on the slopes and 
heights of which are still to be found lonely 
trails, primeval forests, miles of green solitude, 
and a silence unbroken save for hoot of owl 
and laugh of loon. 

What more charming than the approach to 
Hartford and its canal that mirrors tower 
and bridges ? Where will you find two such 
independent young mountain scouts as Tom 
and Holyoke ? Where more gracious watery 
pleasances than the Connecticut's broad sweep 
between still broader meadows, from North- 
field to Claremont and Windsor ? Who has 
had the pleasure of seeing the sentinel outposts 
of the White and Green mountains, Monadnock 
and Ascutney, loom vast and shadowy blue 
through the September haze ? And who, fol- 
lowing the Lower Ammonoosuc and the White 



46 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

through the overlapping foothills into the heart 
of both ranges, has not felt his breath quicken 
at the sudden eclipse of all sunshine and scenery 
as the train rushes into and through an old, 
covered, wooden bridge, few of which remain, 
and out again along precipitous banks below 
which the swiftly flowing water runs, for a brief 
moment, burnished silver ? 

All this beauty is mine by virtue of that in- 
heritance of two thousand acres. I know this 
valley in all seasons, nor can I say in which it 
most entrances. At which " crotch of the river", 
or on which "heaven-kissing hill" those acres 
are spread, whose they are — that is all one to 
me ; my inheritance remains ; it cannot be 

taken from me. 

6. 

I should like to dwell on some of the special 
preserves on this, my largest landed property, 
the Valley of the Connecticut, but it would be 
to the exclusion of an inventory of my many 
lesser, far humbler estates. However, in my 
pride of possession, I may be permitted to sug- 
gest to him who has never journeyed four 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 47 

hundred miles up this valley in mid-winter, to 
make good that omission without waiting many 
years. He will be my debtor. 

Of course, one should choose the time. I 
recall that I made the journey in January, 1898. 

After leaving the Sound and following for 
miles the steely gray river under an ominous, 
clouded sky, we entered, at Springfield, the 
region of snow. At Brattleboro the river flowed 
darkly beneath ice floes. As we followed it 
northward it became ice-bound. Still farther 
on, the newly fallen snow lay thick upon it 
and what was river and what was field it was 
hard to distinguish. 

There had been a heavy snow storm a few 
days before ; it added a foot to the usual winter 
depth. Twenty-four hours of thawing had 
followed closely upon that, and, directly, more 
snow, wet and clinging. In the night before 
I made this journey, the mercury in the more 
northern latitudes had dropped sufficiently to 
fix solidly, as part ice, every flake that had fallen 
on roof, fence, bush, and coppice, on every 
branch of hemlock, spruce, and pine. 



48 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

The gray skies were with us during the whole 
day ; they deepened in the east to a bluish 
slate and against them the New Hampshire 
mountains, snow covered from base to summit, 
showed indefinite and ghostly. The hemlocks, 
black against the gray of sky and white of hill- 
side, were weighted with snow, their lower 
branches broken. The spruce looked thin, for 
every tiny twig and branchlet bent beneath 
its icy load. The pines tpwering into the gray 
held their own, but looked like squads of con- 
victs, for each trunk on the northeast side, 
whence came the last storm, was coated with 
snow and ice ; here and there a heavy over- 
laden lower branch swept the ground. 

But there was no monotony in the ever- 
changing mountain-sides, overlapping hills, in- 
tervales where the watercourses could be traced 
only by the fringe of willows, in the roadside 
coppice of wondrously interlaced and spraying 
bushes. Everywhere was bewildering grace of 
outline : intricate anatomy of forest trees and 
underbrush, curving riverbanks, soft swells of 
meadow lands, flowing, upward reaches of foot- 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 49 

hill slopes leading the eye to mountain profile, 
rounded summit, or sharpened peak. 

Only once, as the train approached Ascutney, 
the sun, being about an hour and a half to its 
setting, broke through the clouded west and, 
for a moment, transformed that noble plain of 
approach, with its adjacent semicircle of hills, 
into a resplendent amphitheatre of prismatic 
colors. 

It was but for a moment; then the gray- 
white of snow and ice on river and plain, the 
white and black of hemlock woods, the soft 
purple gray of our long steam pennon relieved 
the dazzled sight. 

7- 

I can but contrast the autumnal effects of 
color here on the island with those among the 
hills and peaks of the Green and White moun- 
tains. 

Here, over the low moorland, the coloring 
is laid on slowly. I have watched its perfecting 
for two weeks. There are acres of low-running, 
wide-spreading scarlet in monotone; acres of 
browns and yellows; acres of dull, dark red 



So FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

like the lees of wine, all accented by the blackish 
green of dwarfed pine plantations. There is no 
necromancer frost at work here ; it is late 
November before that blight falls. It is sun- 
shine and sea winds, salt-impregnated soil, 
root-seeking sap and natural decay that are 
at work on these moors, painting them with 
large impressionist stroke in broad masses of 
color. 

It is then I look from my eastern windows 
across the harbor, — the blue of which at times 
is the blue of Maggiore beneath the terraced, 
garden walls of Isola Bella, or that glimpse of 
the open Adriatic beyond the Giudecca at 
Venice, — over miles of moorland so rich in 
such subdued perfection of coloring that the 
eye feasts on it, as does the imagination on 
the iteration and reiteration of those old taber- 
nacle colors : "blue, and purple, and scarlet 
and (white) fine twined linen". Somehow that 
special color scheme never seems complete 
unless I add the coverings, "of rams' skins 
dyed red". 

This is autumn on our island. 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 51 



I do not know how many, many times be- 
tween the ages of six and twelve I read that 
formula of color for the tabernacle furnishings 
(my father gave me fifty cents a year for reading 
the Bible through annually. I accomplished 
this task for love of him, stimulated by the 
reward. To what extent am I not his debtor !) ; 
but I do know that the constant reiteration, 
the insistence on that special combination of 
colors, set for me then, and thereafter for my 
life, the standard of color combination that most 
fully satisfies me. 

Never an incomparable moorland sunset, of 
which I am witness, that I do not see the cloud- 
tabernacle curtains of purple and scarlet. Never 
a glimpse of the harbor waters faintly white 
at sunset under the rising of the pale full moon, 
and of the purple-red of the moors beyond, 
never the sight of the fall of foam on the bar 
and the blue of the Sound behind it, that I do 
not experience that elation from gratified color- 
sense, fostered by the ancient artificers' formula : 



52 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

"blue, and purple, and scarlet and fine twined 
linen". 

9- 

But in October, among my mountains and 
hills, the slopes of which feed the Connecticut, 
the crimson flame of maples leaps higher and 
higher up hill and mountain-side. It darts 
unexpectedly from out some dark hemlock 
bush ; it flaunts a branch, a saucy Mephisto- 
phelian feather, above a russet oak. The wood- 
land roads, thickly canopied with birch, beech, 
elm, and now and then a giant butternut, are 
long arcades of varied golds — dull gold, antique 
gold, red and Roman golds, light, California 
virgin gold, with now and then a mass of road- 
side, frost-touched sumach like jacinth in 
ancient Etruscan setting. 

In these northern hills and mountains, three 
hundred miles from this island, the hot mid- 
day sun of October, warm rain, and a sharp, 
hard frost closely following it, are the miracle 
workers. Twenty-four hours may transform 
the mountain world. 

Curious ! Here all the natural and artificial 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 53 

lines are low, earth-seeking, as if adjusting them- 
selves to sea level ; whereas among the moun- 
tains of New Hampshire and Vermont the lines 
tend to the perpendicular, slope-angles of every 
degree leading the eye upward or downward. 

I find as I live longer here that all these 
natural lines lead the vision outward ; they run 
to every point of the compass. I gain a broader 
outlook upon what I may call the levelling pro- 
cesses of life. Among the mountains of our 
North Country I catch the inspiration of life 
from both its heights and depths — an insight 
into it rather than an outlook upon it. 

10. 

A complete inventory of my estates would 
fill this page. I need only indicate a few; 
they are not confined by any means to this 
side of the ocean. I have several in Kent. 
One of the Old Colony grandfathers was a 
clothier from East Greenwich in that county 
and, migrating hither, lived for a time on Kent 
Street, — so called because of the "men of 
Kent" who settled there, — in Scituate. 



54 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

Whenever I have been in London I have 
intended to make that water journey down the 
Thames from Battersea to Greenwich, not 
only to verify the mist and smoke effects of 
Whistler's etching of the Tower Bridge, but to 
see something of London on the Kentish side 
which is far from reminding one of the much 
besung hopfields and cherry orchards of that 
noted English county. Unfortunately this has 
always remained an intention. Had I carried 
it out, East Greenwich, where my clothier- 
grandfather lived, would have claimed my 
interest ; and, after that, a leisurely, looking- 
up-estates excursion into southern Kent, as 
well as Sussex, would have rewarded me satis- 
factorily. 

What concern is it of mine if decades or cen- 
turies ago others purchased, others inherited 
those fine estates of Groombridge, Spedhurst, 
Hockerton, Laundale ? Half their charm lies 
in their names. The present owners cannot 
deprive me of my special brand of inheritance. 
And having feed lodge-keepers, and importuned 
gardeners over Kentish hedges, it is just possible 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 55 

I might have been permitted to set foot on one 
of my many over-seas landed properties. 

Shades of my ancestors ! How well you 
fought, and delved, and loved, and hated ; 
grasped with one hand and gave with the other ! 
And now how thickly lie your bones as dust in 
those old churches and graveyards ; how well 
your mortal bodies have enriched the soil of 
Kent! 

All these good intentions are not confined 
to my English right of domain, for sometime 
— ah, that "sometime"! — I mean to take a 
day for Duxbury and there seek out the land 
where stood the old homestead of the Aldens. 
That poor-rich old grandfather's sister, Abigail, 
married the captain-son of John and Priscilla 
Alden. I am ever grateful to her for favoring 
him ; it gives me a live collateral interest, as 
niece, in her father-in-law's love story. 

11. 

But I must enlarge no longer the category 
of my landed properties. Their real value to 
me consists in the fact that, during my life, I 



$6 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

have always felt at home in farmhouse, fisher- 
man's cottage, in workshop, or mill, in mansion, 
hall, or manor. I can account for this feeling 
of "at homeness" in these varied environments : 
it is an inheritance from those thousands of 
ancestors who were sheltered under such varied 
roof-trees ; who worked — fighting Indians, fish- 
ing, tanning hides, making tar from the pine 
trees of Nahant, weaving cloth, building mills, 
weirs, causeways for the benefit of the com- 
munity and governing it, in that first half- 
century of the Old Colony's life; or, in Eng- 
land, fighting Saxon, French, and brother Eng- 
lishman, cultivating the Kentish land as hind 
or yeoman, adding to great landed estates by 
diplomatic marriage with heiresses, — no little 
work of a certain kind, this, — hobnobbing 
with Chaucer and actually breathing the same 
air with William Shakespeare. I have an 
ancestral grudge of long standing against some 
of those worthies for not handing down to me 
some record of those two Englishmen ! Why 
did not David de Waller, Master of the Rolls 
for thirty years to Edward III., tell us of Chaucer? 



ROOTS, SUBSOIL, AND LANDED ESTATES 57 

12. ' 

As I have already stated, my one piece of duly 
registered estate, what I actually own under the 
law of the land, is a mere back yard here on this 
island. But I assure you it is no ordinary back 
yard. Although its superficial contents are 
registered as something over six thousand square 
feet, its outlook is so far-reaching that it enlarges 
daily to thousands of acres in my mind's eye, 
and I think I dare assert, and with truth, to 
my natural eye as well. Its only back gate is 
the gate of every new day beyond harbor and 
moors ; and not for Golconda's riches would I 
exchange the privilege of seeing the sun rise 
from over those moors in winter, and in summer 
from the ocean haunts beyond the "haulover". 

At such times the back gate becomes the lodge 
gates to a royal demesne. 

At night, in that far east, the lodge gates of 
day being closed, there shine forth two lights 
to mark those portals. One can be seen only 
when the tide is at the flood, and the night is 
both clear and dark. Then one can glimpse 



58 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

the irregular rise and fall of the mast-lanterns 
on the lightship moored twelve miles seawards 
on Great Round Shoal. The other, except in 
times of fog, may always be seen at the eastern 
point of the compass. It is the brilliant flash 
and gleam of Sankaty beacon seven miles away 
across the moors. 

Night after night, season after season, with a 
regularity that allays all fret of present exist- 
ence, that brings calm into the fevered life of 
To-day, those great gates, defined by those two 
lights, open invisibly for the pass and re-pass of 
the full moon, a planet, a constellation. Watch- 
ing their serene entrance, I feel that I own some- 
thing both of earth and heaven. 

No wonder that the little back yard here on 
this island outpost in the Atlantic dwarfs all 
those ancestral estates. 



V 



THE "PASS" 



I. 

This is the island word for what may be 
seen from one's windows, front or back, as it 
may chance, of the local life of the town. 

My front windows are directly on Orange 
v Street which is a thoroughfare. They are 
flush with the sidewalk as are many in this old 
town. Looking from them I am never con- 
scious of the fact that Nantucket is an island. 
I might be in some town in Scotland except 
that the houses are shingled instead of being 
laid in stone ; or in some large village of 
the English Channel coast counties ; yet there 
is not the slightest hint of imitation. It is 
unique. 

Those unacquainted with the winter popula- 
tion might conceive of the town as an American 

59 



60 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

edition of Cranford ; but it is nothing of the 
kind. It is literally running over with chil- 
dren whom, in my experience of three years, I 
have rarely heard cry, so rarely, that at the first 
wail I usually rush to the window to see if any- 
thing untoward has happened. Like the chil- 
dren of foreign lands they play in troops on the 
roadbed of the streets, whether it be of sand, 
asphalt, or cobbles. Their parents also walk 
thereon ; in fact, the whole population, whether 
summer or winter, preempt the roadway rather 
than use the narrow sidewalks where many of 
the protruding flights of front steps, planted 
solidly on the inner half, threaten to knock the 
breath out of an unwary and conventional 
foot-passenger. They remind me of those so- 
called "kneeling windows" on the Florentine 
palaces. I recall that a member of my family 
while taking a walk in that city was, in a mo- 
ment of abstraction, brought up short and 
breathless against the unyielding stone. 

Yes, there are literally troops of children to 
be seen at any hour not occupied in school. 
The majority of them are children of Irish, 



THE "PASS" 61 

Portuguese, Brava, English-American parent- 
age. It is on account of these varied nation- 
alities that I applied the word " marvel " to the 
winter population. The disintegration of the 
old underlying English-American stratum is 
rapidly taking place. There is already amal- 
gamation of various nationalities, and I doubt 
not in another generation or two there will 
result renewed vitality through cross-breeding. 
It is not necessary to be a student of sociol- 
ogy and to seek, for the purpose of observing 
this process of amalgamation or assimilation, 
the cities that are congested by the influx of 
other nationalities. The process can be ob- 
served and studied by any one of clear Vision in 
a mountain hamlet, in a village of the coast, or 
on this island. When beneath my living-room 
windows there can be heard from the "pass" 
Portuguese, Brava — a dialect of the same — 
Greek, French, or English, I realize that I am 
in no backwater, no side eddy of the great 
stream of the migrations of the nations, but 
in the full current, in midstream, as it were. 
A recognition of this, and what it means nation- 



62 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

ally, precludes any considerable feeling of insu- 
lar isolation. 

This "day pass" is, in consequence, more 
intensely interesting to me than a well-staged 
and acted play ; for the stage is a real one, 
and those that figure on it, passing and re-pass- 
ing daily, are not simulating the various roles 
that belong to comedy, to joyous vaudeville, 
to melodrama, misery or tragedy — it is all 
real, but the language is polyglot. 

2. 
There goes Tommy ! a ward of the town and 
one of God's "hidden ones". I do not know in 
all my acquaintance a more dead-in-earnest, 
contented, peaceable — when not tormented — ■ 
worker than he. He loves his pushcart and his 
profession of collecting rubbish. He is a young 
fellow now, and will always remain young of 
heart. He can never "grow up" although he 
is strong, tall, able to do and does according to 
his ability. Delighted with any small gift, he 
cherishes it. Many a time during the last three 
years I have heard him pass the house playing 



THE "PASS" 63 

"Home, Sweet Home" perfectly on his har- 
monica, a Christmas gift. On that first Christ- 
mas when he came into possession of this 
treasure, as he passed beneath the window in 
the early twilight on his way to his only home, 
the poorhouse, I heard him playing that tune 
softly and sweetly. Hearing it, I could but ac- 
knowledge that all earthly joys are relative. 

I should miss Tommy from the "pass". 

Now and then a quahaug fisherman tramps 
by with a huge burlap sack of that succulent 
bivalve on his back. 

Joyous parties of young people on horseback 
canter gayly through the street on their way 
to the state road or the moors. Smart private 
traps, old shays, queer, primitive-looking 
Quaker carts, loads of seaweed coming in from 
the South Shore to be used for fertilizing, carts 
laden with clam shells, fruit, or vegetables all 
join Orange Street's lively procession. 

The bells on the baker's cart may be heard 
at any time of day. They jingle as loudly and 
merrily as if there were two feet of snow, and the 
gay cart on runners ; at least, they hint of 



64 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

winter as I understand the expression of that 
season, but it seems to be wanting very gener- 
ally here. 

The powerful blast of the fisherman's horn 
announces that there is a prospect of mackerel, 
cod, white-bait, scup, flounders, or swordfish 
from the shoals or deep sea. 

There is a very special knife-grinder a glimpse 
of whom is worth much to the eye that de- 
lights in the pure Italian type. His matched 
stationary bells on his little machine are so 
perfect in tone that I, for one, would gladly 
follow him down the street for the sake of pro- 
longing the pleasure they give me. I have had 
less at many a Boston Symphony. 

Sometimes there is other music, crude in its 
way but contributing to round out musically 
the daily "pass". Down the long vista of this 
foreign-looking street I can see the procession 
of the "Carrying of the Crown". There are 
scores of children whose parents only a few 
years ago were celebrating this feast in the 
same way in Lisbon, mayhap, or on one of the 
islands of the Azores. For a moment a queer 



THE "PASS" 65 

little feeling of homesickness — for what I can- 
not say — possesses me wholly. I feel that 
I am in a foreign land. 

Again, on Corpus Christi Day, as I watch 
from an upper balcony the approach of the long 
bright procession, it seems as if I had lost my 
grip on my own nationality. The street is 
filled from side to side with scores of children, 
girls, and youths, all in gala dress. The air is 
filled with the fragrance of flowers, although the 
little wreaths are artificial. They are march- 
ing to the strong blare of trumpet and beat of 
drum beneath the gleam of silken churchly 
banners and — ah ! there they are, glorified 
in the sunshine (I feel again at home), three of 
those old tabernacle colors — "blue and scarlet 
and the white of fine twined linen" — Our 
Colors ! They, too, are a symbol of sanctuary 
to these peoples. 

3- 

As for the "night pass", and there is one, I 
not only cannot see it, I should not care to see 
it if I could. I know perfectly well what is 



66 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

passing along the famous South Channel be- 
yond Great Point and the "haulover". 

I see in imagination the passing of sloop, 
barge, steamer, and schooner — three-masted, 
five-masted — their sails and smoke pennons 
faintly white against the clear dark, or reful- 
gently opaline in the light of the moon. I 
see with the inner eye as plainly as if the outer 
vision could compass it, what is nightly passing 
out there beyond the moors, beyond the forty 
miles of shoals, on the Atlantic main. 

On the nights of terrific wind I see the surf- 
men — the coast patrols — on that long sand 
dune of Coskata, out by Great Point ; I see them 
at Maddequet, on lone Muskeget, or on the 
wild South Shore. They are leaning forward, 
head down and on to the fearful force that beats 
them backwards, beats the breath from their 
bodies till they are forced to lie flat to regain it. 
Stung by sleet, lashed by rain, blinded by driv- 
ing snow, they stagger forward on their awful 
beat towards their goal where, facing about, 
they race before the fury of the wind to their 
shelter in the station. 



THE "PASS" 67 

I see in the north and east the pass of barge 
and schooner bewildered in snow squall, lost in 
fog, helpless among the maze of slues, bars, 
shoals, and rips. I see them caught in the 
sudden gale, dragging anchors, blown from under 
the lee of Great Point, or parting hawsers and 
stranded on one of the numberless shoals — a 
toy for breaking seas. 

I see the crew taking to the rigging, mast and 
spar and marline sleet-coated, or putting off, a 
forlorn hope, in open boats. I see the crew of 
some sinking barge trying in vain to signal to 
the tow ; and, in the fury of the storm, the black- 
ness of the night, I see the surfmen waiting, 
watching, ready at the first break of dawn with 
surfboat and breeches buoy. 

I know that those men lashed in the rigging 
are freezing, the men in the open, drifting boat 
already frozen ; that in the first light of dawn 
the noble surfmen, who risk their lives for their 
fellow-men, will bring them in, frozen, some of 
them, in the open boat, freezing, many of them, 
from the ice-coated rigging. 

I know that on the South Shoals, forty miles 



68 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

from this island, the flashing beacons of the 
lightship rise and fall as the vessel heaves and 
tosses, plunges and rolls in the shallow, tumul- 
tuous waters lashed white by the gale. Inaction 
is the duty of the crew when all about is in 
chaotic movement. They can afford no active 
help; they must simply "stand by" — the 
hardest task for a man. They must keep the 
lights trimmed and burning while their unwieldy 
anchored craft pitches from the crests and rolls 
in the troughs. 

I know that there are other tragedies of the 
sea worse than death ; for, sometimes on those 
ever-anchored but ever-moving ships, the brain 
gives way and when opportunity offers the man 
is taken off — insane from the monotony of 
movement, from the monotony of prolonged 
inaction, constant monotony of sea and sky, 
sky and sea, rising and falling, falling only to 
rise again with inexorable sequence. 

And farther, still farther beyond the South 
Shoals, I see forging ahead, unheeding the 
storm, despite wind, snow, fog, or ice, the huge 
ocean liners. I see their myriad lights, the 



THE "PASS" 69 

brilliant saloon, the warmth of open fires, the 
comfort of library and smoking-room, the lux- 
urious staterooms on the upper decks, the cozy 
cells of the lower ones, the comfortable second 
cabin saloon without the gayety and luxury of 
the first. I see the immigrants' crowded quar- 
ters, the rows of low bunks, the little steerage 
hospital, confined at best. And still beneath 
I see the engines, the coal-bunkers, the bulk- 
heads. And in and through all I see that 
humanity — two thousand five hundred souls 
— afloat on the unstable element of the sea. 

Above in the saloons, the billiard room, the 
grills, there is feasting, laughter, dancing, sing- 
ing, gambling, drinking, debauch. Below, 
anguish of maternity and a new-born babe in 
the steerage hospital, or an old life suddenly 
snuffed out like a candle in one of the immi- 
grants' bunks. And still below there is the 
perfect working of ponderous machinery, the 
withering flame of furnace fires, and men, half 
naked, shovelling with might and main, — the 
steamer is off South Shoals Lightship and the 
record must be broken, — shovelling as for dear 



70 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

life, all through the night shift in their sweat 
and their grime. 

I thank God I may not actually see the "night 
pass" from this Island Outpost in the Atlantic. 
It suffices me to know that through the varying 
seasons, night after night, passing and re-pass- 
ing, it is always there. 



VI 



OUTLOOK 
I. 

Insularity does not necessarily tend to 
restrict outlook on men and affairs. On the 
contrary the field of vision may be enlarged 
although the angle of the point of view may 
shift. At least this has been my personal 
experience here. 

At first I was surprised when in answer to 
my question if the oak wood I was purchasing 
for my fireplaces was well seasoned, the dealer 
replied : "Yes, I've just filled an order from 
some place up the Nile for three cords of the 
same lot, and Mr. ", mentioning the pur- 
chaser's name, "is always particular on that 
point. " 

It certainly extends the boundary of mundane 
affairs, at least of the town, when the honor- 
able selectmen are petitioned on ambassadorial 

71 



72 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

paper, from far away Japan, to lay an asphalt 
covering on a noisy, cobble-paved street of this 
little, antipodal sister-island. 

That my Nantucket neighbors may winter 
in California, Bermuda, Algiers, Canton, or on 
the Riviera, is no longer a matter of comment 
on my part ; it was until I understood that 
this bit of terminal moraine, three miles wide 
and fifteen long, is considered — and is, in 
reality — a kind of social, international clearing- 
house. 

As I have said, the natural lines of the island 
and its environment tend to lead vision out- 
ward and beyond ; and not only is that vision 
unrestricted, except for the limitation of sight, 
but through it there is a stimulation for the 
inner imaginative eye that looks beyond the 
miles of moorland, beyond the ocean horizon 
line, far, far along the waterway of the nations 
to southern seas, to tropics and palms ; and 
ever beyond to antarctic ice and towering moun- 
tain range buried beneath snow and scourged 
by Polar winds — the cradle of continental 
glaciers. 



OUTLOOK 73 

I venture to assert that I think thrice to every 
other American woman's once of Shackleton, 
Scott, and Amundsen, just because my eyes 
can look abroad southward on that ocean the 
Polar seas of which, in the ultimate South, 
wash the shores of the continent they have 
made known to us. 

This breadth of outlook is the island's inheri- 
tance. Its seafaring men, captains, mates, 
sailors before the mast, knew the Seven Seas 
a century before Kipling sang of them. Last 
summer an aged woman gave as her contribution 
to a local charity a basket of shells brought by 
her father from the shores of the Pacific ; they 
were both rare and beautiful. Not long ago 
one of the local carpenters lent me an old ship's 
ledger in which was written his great-uncle's 
account of his nine cast-away years among the 
South Sea islands. It is a straightforward, 
manly narrative of his strange life and how, as 
sole survivor of the crew, he adapted himself 
under necessity to the new environment. It is 
nearly a century old. 

Men of marked business capability and fine 



74 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

intelligence were the owners of merchant-ships 
that carried our flag into the ports of England, 
France, Russia, Sweden, China, and India. And 
now in these interesting homes I may find the 
flotsam of a century, as rare chinas — old Chel- 
sea, Lowestoft, French of the First Empire, or a 
piece of carved teakwood furniture, a shawl 
from the handlooms of Cashmere. One dear 
lady showed me her sixty-seven pitchers — direct 
heirlooms, collateral heirlooms, gifts, many of 
them a collector might envy — and in addi- 
tion twelve dozen infinitesimal silver spoons in 
a carved and polished cherry stone. I judged 
them to be something less than an eighth of an 
inch in length ; a magnifying glass was needed 
to see them properly. They were a wedding 
gift bought in London for her grandmother at 
the time of her marriage there in 1812. 

The island remains true to its cosmopolitan 
inheritance. 

The Rocky Mountain States, the states of the 
Mississippi Valley, the South, the North, moun- 
tain and plain, even the Atlantic coast, all 
contribute their quota to the summer popu- 



OUTLOOK 75 

lation. As for the winter population — that 
is a marvel. 

The second great stream of continental immi- 
gration, setting so powerfully the last twenty- 
years to our shores, has not left this little island 
untouched. Just as the Gulf Stream tempers 
these waters, warming them on the shoals that 
extend forty miles to the south, and makes for 
a climate more equable than any on the Atlantic 
coast north of Charleston, so this island feels 
the influence of foreign influx. 

As a result, I observe on this Atlantic outpost 
of our United States, in this era of rapid tran- 
sition, something of the remaking of all America 
for all Americans. It is well to meet the Inevi- 
table halfway. 

2. 

Removed as I have been for the past few 
years from what I may call the tension of ex- 
istence — the attempt, with millions of other 
bread-winners, to make headway against the 
overpowering and adverse current of metro- 
politan life, I find that this abstraction from 
the rush, the unease, and what, perhaps, I may 



76 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

best designate as the discontinuity of life in 
the rapids of those great centers where for years 
I have made my home — New York and Chi- 
cago, and the minor cities of Boston and Wash- 
ington — has relaxed certain strained attitudes 
towards all life. The outlook has become nor- 
mal. The inner vision has cleared. There is 
no surcharge of excitement to overstrain heart 
or brain. 

As a result, affairs on the continent, — the 
Islanders always speak of the mainland, and 
with right, as "the continent", — national con- 
ditions, sectional changes, flux of new ideas, 
influx of new inventions, reflux of satiety en- 
gendered by too much of both, recover balance 
in my thought of them ; assume normal pro- 
portions. The interplay of forces in the devel- 
opment of our new national life does not threaten, 
does not alarm. These forces show themselves 
as following the natural law of change, the 
corollary of which is, and ever will be, unrest 
— visible or invisible. 

Disintegration is taking place in sections of 
our nation, and men find themselves at loss, 



OUTLOOK 77 

unable to account for the results of it that are 
daily in bewildering conditions before their 
eyes. 

3- 

Take, for instance, our own New England. 
As it is my home, I suppose I may say without 
undue egotism that I love it as well as any other 
New Englander; that I am as anxious for its 
well-being, for its prosperity along industrial 
lines; and yet, and yet — ! The phrase "the 
passing of New England" is no idle one, nor 
uncertain of sound. 

Several years ago while I was living among the 
Green Mountains, the Grand Trunk Railroad 
purchased the Central Vermont. We, who saw 
daily before our eyes evidences of that change 
in ownership, said : "This is one great wedge 
that will, in time, split the solidarity of New 
England." 

My grandfather had as helper at odd times an 
old French Canadian ; his family and two others 
settled in that Green Mountain village; were 
industrious ; prospered in their way ; reared 
their children whose children were educated in 



78 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

the common school, and drew others of their 
nationality to them — a local tannery proving 
the industrial attraction. 

I have wondered often who would have 
worked that tannery if not they ? 

In time, there came to be a large contingent 
of French Canadians among whom I have 
acquaintance. These children's children are 
now Americans to the marrow. I was making 
purchases last spring at a large shop in Boston, 
one of our old reliables, and a pleasant sales- 
woman, in taking my address, said : "Oh, I 
know of you so well; my aunt is ", men- 
tioning one of that third generation of French 
Canadians in the mountain hamlet ; it was but 
little more than that when the first French 
immigrant entered it. 

Within a few years, I have seen the tops of the 
high hills surrounding this same village laid 
bare to sun and storm ; their granite masses 
quarried, hewn, drilled, sculptured, by French, 
Hungarians, Poles, Italians, Lithuanians, Scotch, 
and Germans. I have heard the polyglot of 
languages on the village streets. Seeing all 



OUTLOOK 79 

this, living with it for a time, I have realized 
something of the great forces at work in the dis- 
integration of the foundation racial strata of 
our New England life, as well as of the effect of 
wedge and cleavage. 

I hold it a privilege to have been permitted 
to see at close range the actual working of this 
process of the remaking of America.^ 

4- 

After these quarries had been worked a few 
years, being then in Washington for the winter 
of 1907-1908, I went down one Sunday morn- 
ing to the wholly informal opening of the new 
Washington Station, from the entrance of which 
you may look straight uphill to the Capitol. 

As I stood there among the thousands gath- 
ered to admire the nobly proportioned building 
and the beauty of the stone, purest white gran- 
ite, I said to myself, "I believe I am the only 
one among these thousands who has seen this 
granite in situ, six hundred miles to the north 
among the mountains of Vermont." 

I recalled that day when I drove from my 



80 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

home over the intervening hills to visit those 
recently opened quarries. There, as yet undis- 
turbed, bared of its thin layer of sod, I saw the 
granite that was to materialize in the Wash- 
ington Station through the great portal of 
which the rulers of our country, millions of its 
citizens and school children, its men of science, 
the representatives of foreign lands, were to 
pass and re-pass for — who can say how many 
centuries ? 

It gave me food for thought. 

And the forgotten quarrymen, the Poles, 
Hungarians, Lithuanians, Italians, Scotch, Ger- 
mans, and French who made this possible ? I 
realized as I, too, passed out through that high- 
arched entrance, that without them to dig, to 
hoist, to drill, to hew and smooth and sculp- 
ture, it would not have been possible. And I 
knew, moreover, that within a generation many 
of the children of these various nationalities 
would pass and re-pass through that same por- 
tal as American born citizens, their patriotism 
stimulated by the thought : "Our fathers helped 
to make this. " 



OUTLOOK 8 1 

They will recognize their ownership and be 
justly proud. 

5- 

Surely those third and fourth generations will 
feel toward their fathers, — the makers of Amer- 
ica in what I may call "under the surface" work, 
— as I feel toward the New England pioneers. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, a pioneer 
grandfather on my father's side migrated from 
New Milford into the northern wilderness, work- 
ing his way up the Connecticut Valley, and 
settled on those six hundred acres, "his pitch", 
near its White branch. There he made roads, 
felled trees, built first the log house and after- 
wards the substantial farmhouse of big pine 
from "his pitch"; cleared, broke, and tilled 
his land ; begot sons and daughters ; upheld 
his feeble church as "deacon", in fact, obeyed 
the supreme command : "Acquit yourself like 
a man", and was in due time "gathered to his 
fathers". His simple history is the history of 
thousands of New England born, and his work 
the great work of the New England pioneers. 
All honor to their unrecorded lives. 



82 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

6. 

But the New England is now old. In seven 
years it will have been settled for three cen- 
turies. The work of its pioneers has long been 
finished. Even its industrialism is aging. Its 
industrial initiative is diminishing. Its lines 
of traffic are not the lines of great national 
food supply and never will be because of its 
isolation. It is a small, cold, northeast corner 
of the United States. It would take but little 
to render it insular so far as its physical con- 
figuration is concerned. Maine is three fourths 
wilderness. New Hampshire is at a standstill 
in population. After one hundred and twenty- 
three years of statehood, Vermont's utmost is 
approximately three hundred and fifty thou- 
sand. Massachusetts still has thousands of 
acres of waste land ; its commerce is not holding 
its own ; its traffic along railroad lines is grad- 
ually being "side-tracked"; its fisheries are 
being rivalled. 

The New England that our forefathers opened 
up, the New England that our fathers devel- 



OUTLOOK 83 

oped has, in a sense, had its day. It is subject, 
as is every enterprise of settlement, manufac- 
tures, mining, agriculture, to the law of dimin- 
ishing results ; and no building of enormous 
docks, no extension of railroads, no forcing of 
mill industries, will aggrandize, enrich her, or 
tempt to settlement. Certain sections of our 
own country, because of the rapid development 
of the whole during the last seventy-five years, 
must fall by their own weight. The balance of 
sectional development, owing to the pace at 
which this continent has been tracked with 
railroads, nerved with telegraph and telephone, 
quarried and mined, has been unsettled. 

7- 

The history of this island will be, I believe, 
an epitome of the history of New England. 

Thomas Macy, one of its original purchasers 
and one of the first three settlers, left Salisbury, 
not that he was persecuted, but because in his 
own words, "he could not in justice to his con- 
science longer submit to the tyranny of the 
clergy and those in authority." This is an echo 



84 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

of the Pilgrim Fathers and, heard as early as 
1659, indicates the tyranny of the Puritan 
theocracy. 

There followed slow development, slow in- 
coming of others who sought this refuge for 
other reasons, perhaps as potent. In the course 
of a century the whale fisheries made known the 
island to the world, and its merchant-ships and 
whalers were found in every port. The popu- 
lation increased rapidly because of prosperity. 
Prosperity, dependent on the demand for a 
world supply of its commodity, waxed because 
of that demand for the island's particular prod- 
uct. In the middle of the last century sperm 
oil gave place to crude petroleum ; the opening 
of the first oil well wrote "the end" for Nan- 
tucket's extensive maritime interests. Business 
stagnation followed. Its people migrated. 
Grass grew in the cobble-paved streets. 

As a child, I came once to it from the Cape, 
and for one night. There has remained with 
me the impression of foggy drowsiness, of the 
absence of life in the streets and little lanes, of 
the salt marshes at low tide, and of a quaint 



OUTLOOK 85 

home in an alley where my mother, aunt, and 
I were made welcome. I recall the mustiness 
of the tiny rooms, the oily smell from a kerosene 
lamp, the all-pervasive air of another-world- 
ness than that to which I was accustomed. 

Now, after these many years I am here again 
— at home. The streets are lively with a life 
foreign to me. The bay is dotted with the 
boats of scallop and quahaug fishermen. One 
winter day three years ago I counted twenty- 
one sail coming down from the upper harbor. 
Now, after so short a time, I rarely see a fisher- 
man's sail ; only power boats are at work with 
drag and rake and dredge. The quaint houses, 
the quiet, picturesque lanes are still here, but 
every house available seems to have been bought 
by the "off-islanders". 

The spring, summer, autumn, see another 
life, and the population exceeds by thousands 
that of the island in its most prosperous days. 

This is the redintegration of this Island Out- 
post. In the century to come I foresee some- 
thing of the same process for our old New 
England. 



86 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

8. 
One must have lived away from this section 
of the country for some years to realize this. 
One must have lived in the great centre of the 
Mississippi Valley, that enormous granary of a 
continent, to understand the significance of 
Cobden's words: "Here will one day be the 
headquarters of agriculture and manufacturing 
industry ; here will one day centre the civiliza- 
tion, the wealth, the power of the entire world." 

9- 

We need, also, to saturate our minds with 
national facts, economic, climatic, racial, and 
historical, as well as acquaint ourselves with 
the ideals of those three great states on the 
Pacific Coast and of that empire on the divide 
and slopes of the Rockies — Montana. Its 
eastern foothills, alone, will yield in the future 
sustenance for millions. 

We need to look farther in order to see more 
clearly and deeper into our national life and its 
mainsprings ; to remind ourselves oftener that 



OUTLOOK 87 

although New Englanders, we are something 
more — and all the time something more, not 
merely at elections or in national crises ; that 
we are citizens of a great republic which seeks 
its sources of vitality among all sorts and con- 
ditions of men who find themselves in a won- 
derful country of possibilities, known as yet to 
comparatively few among the working mil- 
lions. 

Homogeneity, the old racial status of New 
England, works intensely in one direction and 
in the interest of the special race. Hetero- 
geneity, the present racial status of our entire 
country, works diversely, more slowly, but none 
the less powerfully towards the common interest 
of the Race. 

We shall come to recognize — and without 
such great periodical discouragement, without 
such spasmodic despair when we fail in reaching 
the special local goal we have in view — that 
in the course of historical development which, 
in the end, is economic development, for a grow- 
ing nation's history follows the lines of its food 
supplies, that we are getting out of the current, 



88 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

not crowded out, — a condition which would 
permit us with desperate struggle to get in again, 
— but that, sectionally, we are economically 
and, I dare assert, educationally devolving. 

10. 

I wish I had a little influence with the Board 
of Overseers of Harvard ! If I had, I would 
urge them to appropriate the interest of some 
of their available millions to the founding of 
travelling scholarships exclusively in our own 
country. 

The students obtaining them should visit 
the universities of the states, the mines, mills, 
plantations, agricultural schools, reservoirs, 
dams, docks. They should acquaint them- 
selves with the country's watersheds, with the 
methods of irrigation. They should know the 
forest slopes of the Sierras and Cascades, as 
well as the muskeg and black spruce of Minne- 
sota. They should know the Great Lakes, and 
their traffic undreamed of by Easterners. They 
should know the great civic centres and the 
loggers' camps of north and south, east and 



OUTLOOK 89 

west. They should note the direction of the 
great streams of immigration, their diversion 
and distribution along certain lines that can but 
be affected now that the great Canal is about 
to divert some of the over-seas humanity to 
the Pacific Coast. 

Nor should they be content with noting the 
direction of the greater affluents of this immi- 
gration stream. They should note carefully 
the little rills of immigrant labor with their 
tiny irrigation gates in mountain village, 
prairie settlement, or sea-coast hamlet; they 
should take note even of the "seep". 

Then this old New England, into the heritage 
of which some of them may have been born, 
will assume in their eyes its rightful proportions 
in the scheme of "things as they are" in our 
United States. With no less loyalty to her 
three hundred years of history, her traditions, 
her accomplishments in the past, but with in- 
creased power to understand the accurate di- 
mensions of the part she is to play in the future 
of the nation's life, — its councils, its economics, 
its perils, and prosperity, — they will enter into 



9o FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

her service equipped in a measure to avoid for 
themselves and their children disheartening illu- 
sions ; to interpret to another generation her 
waning powers and to determine the lines of 
her redintegration. 

That man who has studied at first hand his 
country's racial necessities, and her natural 
endowments for the supply of those necessities, 
will render better service as a citizen, will be 
better prepared to direct New England's energy, 
into what channels soever it shall be diverted, 
through understanding and accepting the fact 
that the New England of the past three cen- 
turies, the standard-bearer for the colonies, 
many times voice and guide for a young nation, 
breeder of sons that colonized in the west, 
pioneer in industrialism, is now, in all truth, 
an old New England that is but a small part of 
a great National Whole the ideals for which 
are to be sought and found among its youth in 
the Great West. 

And this is as it should be. 



VII 



CERTAIN MOODS OF THE MOORS 
I. 

They are so wide-reaching that even the sea, 
bounding them on the east, west, and south, 
seems not to confine but to enlarge them. One 
is apt to think them stable of aspect until one 
has lived with them intimately ; then one real- 
izes that they have many moods and tenses. 

During the four years of my residence here 
they have acquired, in my thought at least, the 
charm of a strong personality that, as yet, has 
not wholly revealed itself to me nor, it may be, 
ever will. This is one of the sources of their 
charm. They allure, yet baffle ; they take you 
into their confidence but always with reserve 
and a hint of "more if they would". It has its 
secrets, this moorland which is the creation 
primarily of a continental ice-sheet, and it with- 
holds them from all who have not the fine hear- 
ing ear, the seeing eye, the understanding heart 

91 



92 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

for this special expression of nature. It will 
reveal itself, and then but in part, only to its 
lovers, and even to them in unexpected moods. 

You wander out a mile or two over their 
seemingly monotonous stretches, and suddenly 
you are aware that there is buoyancy in your 
walk ; the closely matted surface of the meal- 
plum vines, that cover them, fairly springs 
beneath your feet. You mount one of the many 
soft, rounded breasts — those innumerable 
swells of the moorland — to look about you on 
an afternoon in July. 

There may be no wind which is an exceptional 
condition here of the air at all seasons. Then 
there is a quiet abroad that is the distilled 
spirit of calm ; not even the hum of a bee is 
heard, not the stirring of an insect's wing. 
The sunshine filters through a light haze that 
amplifies the distance, and the great moor- 
mother basks in it, offering her warm breasts 
to those of the earth-children who seek her. A 
natural peace broods both body and soul. 

It is well to let nature work her will with us 
on such a day, in such a place. 



CERTAIN MOODS OF THE MOORS 93 

2. 

Over westwards there is a tiny house hunched 
against one of these moorland swells. It is 
protected on the north by this rise of land. The 
west and south lie wholly open to it. I should 
like to own it that I might see from its windows 
the approach of those wondrous storm-clouds 
from the southwest that in huge, riven masses, 
their dark edges frayed, bear rapidly continent- 
wards. They cloak the firmament with their 
voluminous swinging folds. Their trailing skirts 
efface the dun-colored, low-lying moors, levelling 
and blotting out. They sweep unendingly, so it 
appears to one watching, at the rate of thirty 
miles an hour, out of the watery wastes and 
over this island toward the mainland. 

At such times I am permitted to see the storm 
clouds at work between the vast of the deep and 
the vast of the sky. I see the strain and the 
travail for they are heavy with rain, the tortuous 
upward twist of the gigantic, wind-driven masses 
in their onward rush landwards. 

This great natural arena for this elemental 



94 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

wrestling match is best seen, I believe, from the 
Nantucket moors. 

3- 
They hold constant surprises for those who 
frequent them. One may come unexpectedly 
on a tiny cup-like hollow among the soft, 
moorland breasts. It is filled with clear water 
that floats dark green, leathery lily pads, and 
white lilies open wide to the August sun. Sur- 
rounding it is a low irregular coppice of wild 
roses in bloom. Incense of water lilies, the 
spicy fragrance of the wild rose, and, for an 
added sensuous delight, the breeze coming in 
from the near-by ocean and stirring a petal here 
and there. 

4- 

But oh, the marshes on their borders, where 
the shy wild life lives for a while and feeds ! 
Wild land about pond and pool — peat-bog, 
and hummock, marsh and reedy inlet filled 
from the largess of the adjoining sea ; wild 
November skies and the hoarse kruk of coot, 
the scream of gulls flying high over the island ! 



CERTAIN MOODS OF THE MOORS 95 

5. 

On ordinary starlight nights the moors are 
never dark. There is a curious atmospheric 
luminosity about them that gives the impres- 
sion of great enclosed space — the unbroken 
arch of the sky is responsible for that — illu- 
mined dimly from beneath. Something of the 
same effect can be seen across the dunes of Hol- 
land. I suppose it is a matter of refracted light 
from the circumambient waters of the ocean. 

Those are nights to be remembered when 
in the early evening the new moon and Venus, 
apparently within its curve, are setting together 
in the clear dark beyond the line of the moors 
where the ocean bounds them. 

I keep certain joys for myself in anticipation ; 
it is one of my life's best assets. Sometime in 
the April of 19 14, I mean to see Orion wheel 
slowly down the dark expanse of moorland and 
sink at last, star by star — flash of Rigel, gleam 
of Betelgeux — into the Atlantic. 

As for nights of full moon, there is enough 
light focussed on this island to supply an 



96 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

archipelago. Then even the moors partake of 
the glamour of the silvered sea. 

6. 

"What must it be like in such a soft dark night 
out there on the moors where, westwards, 
never a beacon shines from home or lighthouse 
tower ?" 

This I ask myself when I stand at the open 
door and listen to the unbroken, heavy undertone 
of seas pounding on the south shore. On such 
a dark night, for instance, as I last stood in the 
open doorway listening to that marvellously 
deep basal note, with which was mingled from 
time to time strange overtones, and wondering 
that the impetus of those heavy seas, the after- 
math of some terrific storm far, far away on 
the Atlantic, did not carry them across the isl- 
and to mingle with the quiet harbor waters. 

This low, far-away booming of surf is seldom 
heard in the town ; the conditions for it are 
rarely combined. To produce it there must 
have been a severe storm somewhere to the 
south of us on the Atlantic ; the night must be 



CERTAIN MOODS OF THE MOORS 97 

practically windless, or with a gentle steady 
breeze from the same point of compass. 

At such times, in the soft dark, under clouded 
skies, the moors must reveal another world 
to him who seeks them. The eye must first 
of all accustom itself to the impenetrable dark- 
ness. The ear must wont itself to the constant 
terrific roar and boom of surf breaking along 
fifteen miles of sand beach ; the mind adjust 
itself subjectively, of necessity. Thoughts crowd 
the consciousness in such an hour, in such a 
place. There is a blind groping, a vain 'search- 
ing of the spirit, a realization of its impotence 
in that universal dark. 

What a beacon to our very soul if on the 
benighted sight the glowing twinkle of one 
firefly should break suddenly against the sur- 
rounding blackness ! 

7- 

There is but one perfect epic for such a dark- 
ness, for such a night ; one perfect expression of 
the thoughts such an environment must en- 
gender : Hellen Keller's "Chant of Dark- 
ness" : 



98 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

"Out of the uncharted and unthinkable dark we come, 
And in a little while we shall return again 
Into the vast, unanswering dark." 

This would be the moorland's hymn on such 
a night, and its accompaniment the deep diapa- 
son of breaking seas. 

8. 

I confess I find a certain satisfaction in 
materializing anticipated joys, or good inten- 
tions, by writing them out; it is a process of 
anticipatory realization. I find I am saved 
many disenchantments thereby. 

Now I know perfectly well that were I to go 
out alone into the darkness on the moors, — 
provided I could gain courage to get beyond 
the town, — I should find it infinitely "poky" 
in that dark ; and I have a woman's horror 
of finding myself alone in a "dark poky place ". 
Nor do I doubt that if, by a supreme effort 
of will and groping along that rutted sand-road, 
I could place myself well for observing the 
effect of such surroundings on my consciousness, 
— for, of course, there would be nothing to see 
objectively, — I should promptly relight the 



CERTAIN MOODS OF THE MOORS 99 

lantern I had but just extinguished and, with- 
out making many particular thoughts on eter- 
nity, infinity, or various conceptions of the 
universe, turn my steps homeward with an 
alacrity wholly inconsistent with certain 
cherished ideals. 

This confession must be made if section 7 
is allowed to stand ; and stand it shall because 
of that wonderful chant by a woman who, 
born into physical darkness, has attained never- 
theless to such dazzling illumination of soul 
that to us, marvelling, her whole existence 
seems at times "dark through excess of light ". 

9- 

February, 1910. 

I have been out on the moors for two of the 
morning hours. During the night there was a 
fine fall of snow over the island. It fell quietly, 
without heavy wind to drift it. At sunrise I 
was introduced to another world. 

It is a fact that because the winds are so 
strong and constant here at all times, much of 
the snow is blown over and off the island. 



ioo FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

This statement was made to me when I came, 
and left me sceptical. I have since verified it. 
The storms that leave even a little depth of 
snow, and for only a day or two, can be counted 
on the fingers of one hand. 

On this particular morning, at nine o'clock, 
the sun, although not high, was both brilliant 
and warm, the sky a more intense blue than I 
have ever seen it except in January in Italy. 
From a swell of the moors, beyond the forking 
of the western end of the long main street, I 
could see to south and west for miles across 
the undulating white expanse. In the south 
a line of deep indigo defined the ocean bound of 
the besnowed island. To the west stretched a 
magic land all sparkle and gleam and glitter, 
its white swells catching every beam of high 
light. The hollows between them were filled 
with a myriad soft shadowy hints of every 
nuance of violet and purple. 

Below me, in the lee of the little hill, a small 
herd of cows was nipping at the tips of the dried 
grass pricking through the light covering of 
snow. Evaporation had begun already, for 



CERTAIN MOODS OF THE MOORS 101 

here and there the air ran quivering to and fro 
over certain sun-beshone lowlands. The gray 
walls of the great water-tower in the foreground 
accented the dazzling whiteness. 

Oh, the charm of all this in its lowly way ! 



VIII 

MY MAIL 
I. 

We have a really delightful little steamer, 
a propeller, that in the winter months braves 
almost any weather to keep us in touch with the 
mainland. It is one of the island's best assets 
but, unfortunately, not always available owing 
to heavy storms and stress of high winds com- 
bined with tides. 

At first I used to please myself with the 
thought that the daily arrival of the boat would 
keep me posted concerning affairs on our con- 
tinent and the interests of my special friends. I 
was fond of quoting — to myself naturally — as 
I watched the boat make its way into the 

harbor : 

"Every day brings a ship, 
Every ship brings a word ; 
Well for those who have no fear, 
Looking seaward well assured, 
That the word the vessel brings 
Is the word they wish to hear." 
102 



MY MAIL 103 

This was satisfying as a bit of pure sentiment, 
but I soon found that it was a sentimental 
fallacy. The word about town, "No boat for 
Nantucket to-day", quenches both hope and 
sentiment in regard to a dependable daily mail. 
I have seen the time when if we were so fortunate 
as to receive it once in seven days, I was de- 
voutly thankful. In justice I must add that 
this state of things has obtained but once during 
my four years of residence. 

But what added zest it gives to read the 
letters that have been delayed in transmission, 
if only for one day ! What a goodly pile I am 
apt to find in the mail basket, followed next 
morning by the second delivery — books, news- 
papers, magazines, and delightful remembrances 
from various quarters of the globe. Why, only 
the other day, all Norway came over in the 
Sankaty, the boat at present in service. 

Ever since I knew that country to be a geo- 
graphical fact, I have dreamed of it ; hoped to 
visit it; delighted myself with imaginative 
pictures of it — the winters in particular : its 
snow-covered mountains, crystal fjords, pine 



104 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

forests ice and snow laden, the strange light of 
its partially sunless days, the long twilights, 
the ethereal dawns. By way of contrast, I 
like to imagine the midnight sun shining on 
the peaks of the northern islands, the high light 
on mountain pastures, the deep shadows in 
the valleys, and behold ! — here they are in 
the mail, having crossed the North Sea, the 
Atlantic Ocean, and Nantucket Sound to reach 
me from Christiania. There are fifty-four im- 
pressions from large photographs : among them 
the midnight sun on the Lyngen fjord, the 
Lofoten islands, the august Saldul Gate, Gausta, 
the Isterdel Peaks, Romsdalshorn — yes, and 
Gjende, the mountain tarn in Jotunheim, and 
the ridge of the same name along which Peer 
Gynt sped on the reindeer's back ! 

In addition I possess a letter of sixteen pages 
from the sender of the gift, a Norwegian lady — 
an English letter, perfect as to script, grammar, 
phrasing, and expression. She writes : "I am 
fifty years old, and since I was fourteen, I have 
taken the greatest interest in English literature 
and of late in the American also. I know both 



MY MAIL 105 

Emerson and Thoreau, and some of the new 
novelists. Of poets, I know chiefly Longfellow, 
Whittier, and Whitman." 

Reading this I feel as if I knew not one iden- 
tical thing about anything ! Why haven't I 
learned Norwegian in all these years ? Why have 
I contented myself with translations either in 
English or German of Frithjof 's Saga, of Bjornson 
and Ibsen ? Why haven't / five Norwegian 
authors read in the vernacular to my credit ? 

Possibly, only possibly, if I had really liked 
Ibsen as I like Goethe, I might have been 
tempted to acquire a reading knowledge of the 
Norse for the sake of the richness of rhyme 
and the lightness of rhythm in his poetic master- 
pieces. But I did not like him, do not like him, 
and never shall like him. I think I have good 
reason for these various tenses of negative 
dislike, but I dare not tell this to the lady in 
Christiania — not yet ! 

2. 
It is a reproach against us in general that, 
because we are women, it is difficult for us to be 



io6 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

"fair", as the children say. By which is meant, 
presumably, that our emotional natures, our 
quicker if less firmly grounded sympathies, our 
strong advocacy of a cause without intensive 
working over the reasons for our advocacy, 
our transient, indiscriminate adoption of new 
ideas and, to the masculine mind, our inconse- 
quent action in grave affairs without so much 
as a "buffer" of reason between us and calamity, 
pervert the judgment and dethrone justice. 

I suppose it is all true — indeed, I do not quite 
see how we should be women at all without these 
inconsistencies. To make my personal con- 
fession, I do find it difficult to be "fair", but 
that does not prevent my wanting to be — 
oh, so fair ! And I really struggle, desperately 
at times, to appear so whether I am or not. 

Having confessed this much, it would seem 
that a further confidence might be in place. I 
have a "corrective" for all my "unfairnesses": 
I wait, simply wait. After expressing myself 
in what I call my "sputter", — a harmless 
enough diatribe in regard to persons and things, 
— I feel I can wait, wait patiently a month, a 



MY MAIL 107 

year, a decade, a quarter of a century if neces- 
sary, to be shown where I am at fault, where I 
have not been "fair". Life's experience is my 
"corrective" for all unfairness. I know that, 
despite any will of mine, it must modify if there 
be anything in my pronunciamento to be modi- 
fied ; that it will clear my mental atmosphere of 
the mists of prejudice the result of environment, 
heredity, or training ; that it will force me to see 
that what is heterodox to me is orthodox to 
another. 

I wait — and Life turns a corner, suddenly 
perhaps, and I see as suddenly from another 
point of view. It gains a height, and I get an 
inspiration that gives me insight into the depths. 
It adjusts a different lens to my eyes by which I 
may discern the right, detect the wrong; by 
which I mean I am enabled to see deep enough 
into the verities and insincerities that underlie 
all the attempts of us humans to express our- 
selves in this world whether by daily living, in 
what way soever attainable, or along certain 
lines as in the arts : painting, sculpture, by the 
written thoughts as literature. 



108 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

In the end, I am made to do justice to effort, 
not the result of that effort ; to motives, not to 
movements along certain unexpected lines of 
action ; to accept not so much the manifestations 
of genius as the intent behind their expression. 

"Just wait awhile," I say to myself, "and 
despite all your 'sputterings' you will be 
'fair' in your final judgment. You can't help 
being fair in the end, for Life's experience tills 
your soul whether you will or no ; ploughs and 
harrows, and sows many seeds that in due season 
ripen, many of them, to a harvest of tolerance." 

After writing that decided statement, "I 
never liked Ibsen, do not like him, and never 
shall like him," I held my pen suspended for a 
moment, questioning : "Am I fair in saying 
that ? Am I not allowing the prejudice of 
fifteen years' standing to bias that statement ? 
Is not the disdain with which I re-read his works 
four years ago distorting my point of view, 
discoloring what is seen from it ?" 

3- 
I took out a note-book, — like all my intended 

note-books four fifths of the pages are blank and 



MY MAIL 109 

the notes on the remaining fifth disjointed in the 
extreme, — and am copying some of my "sput- 
terings" about Ibsen's works which in the 
winter of 1909-1910 I re-read to get an idea of 
his powers. Here they are. They show pretty 
conclusively how I felt towards them after a 
"wait" of eleven years. Evidently that length 
of time had not cleared the atmosphere for me. 
And I do so want to be fair ! 

"Ibsen — the spectacle ! The freedom ( ?) of 
Nietzsche become here an obsession. 

"Compare sanity of Meredith, of Stevenson. 

"What healthy work there is in Genesis 
compared with this ! 

"The ideal holds the truth in suspension. 
With Ibsen it seems to be ideals versus truth. 
The trouble seems to be that he has laid his 
foundation stones in wrong relation to the super- 
structure — en delit, as is said of the quarried 
stratified rocks when placed in the walls con- 
trary to their manner of lying in the stratum. 

"Realism, or anything else, to the zero power 
equals one — the ' I ', one-self, of Ibsen and 
Co., — the sick ego. 



no FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

"Look at this ! Ghosts (morphia — insanity, 
heredity), — The Wild Duck (pistol), — The 
Doll's House (threatened suicide), — Rosmers- 
holm (foot-bridge), — Hedda Gabler (pistol), 
— Emperor and Galilean (insanity). 

"We thrive in the sunshine, not in the rainbow- 
hued scum of putrescence. True, the sunshine 
may be broken by a medium into its elemental 
colors (oh, the unsavory misuse of that word 
'elemental' and its meaning !), but the rainbow 
colors are not those in which we grow and thrive 
and develop, oh no ! One-thoughted men, 
obsessed men, are apt to see through the medium 
of green, red, blue, or yellow, and the readers 
of their works see life-facts as they present 
them colored by this broken prismatic mentality. 
Hence the morbid tendencies (morbidus, morbus, 
diseased, unwholesome, threatening decay) of 
Ibsen ; hence the seeing red like Nietzsche ; 
hence yellow like — 

"Oh, the sunlit clarity of a Goethe, the whole- 
some sunshine of Shakespeare ! Oh, the crystal 
sunniness of the order of life lived by the God- 
Man of Galilee ! No wonder that so many of 



MY MAIL in 

these modern writers' creations cry out 'The 
sun — the sun ' — ' Helios — Helios ! ' They 
are crying for what humanity cannot do with- 
out. That cry, at least, shows common sense. 

"In the prose dramas, Ibsen's people seem to 
be presented as if suddenly seized with cramps — 
whether mental, moral, or physical it is for the 
audience to determine. 

"There is a perverted dreaming that gives us 
Peer Gynt. There is another dreaming that 
gives us the imagination of a Newton and the 
law of gravitation." 

4- 

Re-reading these notes after four years, I 
say to myself: "Now, you are not wholly fair. 
Read something of his again ; find out what 
Life has taught you in these forty-eight months. " 

I took Peer Gynt and read it straight through 
at one sitting. With the lovely Norwegian 
scenes before my eyes, I interpreted that wonder- 
ful first act very differently. Among the photo- 
graphs was one of Lake Gjende in Jotunheim. 
There was the very ridge, the arete, of those 
mountains along which sped the reindeer buck on 



ii2 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

his mad course, carrying Peer Gynt on his back, 
held there by the powerful backward thrust 
of the horns. And there the lake, the mountain 
tarn, into which both rider and buck plunged 
to meet their double in the clear dark of its 
waters ! 

I began to live with Peer and his mother Ase ; 
and when we begin to live in the experience of 
another's narrative, whether real or imagined, 
we become necessarily one of it and with it. 
We no longer see it with our eyes, but through 
those of the actors in it. Not until then can we 
in the least degree judge of the intention of the 
creator. When we live, even in sympathetic 
imagination, through the experience of another, 
whether that life-experience be fiction or truth, 
then for the first time we are freed from prejudice, 
are ready to do justice to effort irrespective of 
result. 

"Have you ever 

Chanced to see the Gendin-Edge ? 

Nigh on four miles long it stretches 

Sharp before you like a scythe. 

Down o'er glaciers, landslips, screes, 

Down the toppling gray moraines, 



MY MAIL 113 

You can see, both right and left, 
Straight into the tarns that slumber, 
Black and sluggish, more than seven 
Hundred fathoms deep below you. 
Right along the edge we two 
Clove our passage through the air.'* 

And reading on and on I live the experience 
of this strange Peer Gynt. I understand his 
poorly equipped temperament, the rich but 
flighty imagination — a will-o'-the-wisp for the 
shifting desires — the weakness of his will, the 
purposelessness of a life begotten on the one 
hand in drunkenness and on the other fos- 
tered by the pathetic, imaginative nature of his 
poor, peasant mother. 

Ah, that mother's death ! Never have I 
read a more heart-rending scene. I see the 
miserable, despoiled hut on the mountain, the 
boards for couch, the fur robe, and the son, 
but just returned from his wanderings, drawing 
upon his most vivid and powerful fancies to 
help tide her over that last mortal hour ! 

I have seen Faust given on the Dresden 
stage by the best talent in Germany, but the 
prison scene cannot compare with this, nor can 



ii 4 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

those last words, "She is saved", ring more 
true than the simple words of the peasant wife, 
Solveig, who, waiting years for Peer's return, 
answers to his cry : 
Hast thou doom for a sinner, then speak it forth ! 

Solveig 

He is here ! He is here ! Oh, to God be the praise ! 

{Stretches out her arms as though groping for him.) 

Peer 

Cry out all my sins and trespasses. 

Solveig 

In nought hast thou sinned, oh, my only boy. 

{Gropes for him, and finds him.) 



Peer 
Canst thou tell where Peer Gynt has been since we parted ? 

Solveig 
Been ? 

Peer 

With his destiny's seal on his brow ; 
Been, as in God's thought he first sprang forth ! 
Canst thou tell me ? If not, I must get me home, — 
Go down to the mist-shrouded regions. 



MY MAIL US 

SOLVEIG 

{Smiling) 

Oh, that riddle is easy. 

Peer 

Then tell what thou knowest ! 

Where was I, as myself, as the whole man, the true man ? 

Where was I, with God's sigil on my brow ? 

Solveig 
In my faith, in my hope, in my love. 

******* 

Peer 

My mother, my wife ; oh, thou innocent woman ! — 
In thy love — oh, there hide me, hide me ! 

(Clings to her and hides his face in her lap.) 

Solveig 

(Singing softly) 

Sleep thou, dearest boy of mine ! 

I will cradle thee, I will watch thee — 

Yes, Life has taught me in these last four 
years. I understand Peer Gynt ; and in nothing 
he has written has Ibsen seen more deeply 
and more "musically" into life than in this 
reading of a woman's love. When deepest 



n6 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

and truest, there is in it always something of 
the maternal. 

Yet Mr. Shaw affirms: "No man will ever 
write a better . . . comedy than . . . Peer 
Gynt." The italics are mine. 

5- 

In the prose dramas I still see the "cramps" — 
certain men and women galvanized into a 
semblance of life. Doubtless this is artistry; 
but I see the wires that are manipulated to 
produce the convulsive movements and, in 
consequence, I find no true art. 

I believe that Ibsen's enduring fame will rest 
on "The Pretenders" and "Peer Gynt". 

6. 

But to my mail. Here is a package from far 
away India ; there are only a few words with it, 
but a whole "travelogue" in the fifty postal 
cards. For this evening I am there — the breadth 
of two continents distant from Norway. 

I have to laugh at myself and our strictly 
up-to-date Bostonians over the manner in which 



MY MAIL 117 

we "tackled" India in the time of Mozoomdar ! 
In my youth, after the true Bostonese manner, 
I proceeded to ransack Bates Hall for works on 
India. I wonder now how in that young youth, 
with a vivacity of temperament and keen 
joy in life that forbade any introspection, I 
absorbed, or seemed to, those works. At the 
finish — I think this special cult lasted with me 
about five months — it is no matter for wonder- 
ment that I did not know (I must use a slang 
phrase just here, for no other expresses the con- 
dition of mind) "where I was at" ! 

Goodness, what a list — for youth ! Had 
I not found last year another of those note- 
books in the attic of our mountain home, I 
should never have remembered that I had so 
much as touched India "esoterically". I find 
I accomplished "Esoteric Buddhism", — a clear 
waste of precious youth, — and through Max 
Miiller, something of the Vedas, the Zendavesta 
and the Mahabharata, and "India, What Can 
It Teach Us ?", "The Oriental Christ", and 
"Faith and Progress of the Brahmo Somaj", 
and what more I have not listed. 



n8 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

Although I have forgotten all this, I feel that 
I know India through two books, one poem, 
one Tale, a statue, and a woman. 

A "Life of Buddha", in German, a marvel- 
lous record of a marvellous life, interpretive in a 
way of that most wonderful Life of the New 
Testament. 

One poem by Goethe, "Der Gott und die 
Bayadere". All India's martyrdom of woman- 
hood is in it ; all the glory of its sacrificial love, 
and its divine reward even to the outcast. 

My third is, of course, "Kim"; and the one 
Tale, "The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney". 
I read in some paper the other day — the New 
York Post, I think — a conversation with 
Kipling in which he said that Mulvaney was 
dead. He must have been mistaken. Mul- 
vaney is one of the Immortals ; there is no 
death for such as he. 

This is the India I know. I am very grateful 
to the German author, to Goethe and Kipling 
for having made me acquainted with it. 

Before me on my writing table is a Buddha ; 
it is about eight inches high and sculptured from 



MY MAIL 119 

a hard red stone — it looks to be a kind of 
porphyry. This is overlaid with solid beaten 
silver. 

When I was a small child of eight, a mis- 
sionary, who had been many years in Burmah, 
was for a few days a guest in our home. She 
was a charming woman, with an abundance of 
little, brown side-curls that bobbed about, 
merry eyes, and a sweet comfortable voice. 
She told me legends of India and stories of 
Indian children, of the natives rich and poor, of 
elephants and their wonderful memory ; of her 
being awakened one morning by what seemed 
to be the effect of a prolonged earthquake. The 
ground continuing to shake, she looked out of 
the window and saw forty elephants coming 
toward the house. Each elephant carried a 
log for building purposes in his trunk. The 
natives were about to present her with the 
Christmas gift of a new house of worship, the 
first having been destroyed by fire. 

She brought with her this Buddha before me. 
It was a gift to my father. It is an old house- 
hold god of a rich family who abjured their 



120 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

ancient faith for the new, and gave the symbol 
of the old to the missionary of the new. 

It has a curious effect — the study of it. 
The eyelids are half closed. But if you examine 
the statue closely, looking up under those full 
lids, you may see something startling : the god 
is watching ; he is mindful of all that transpires, 
externally, internally. Gaze at those eyes 
steadily for a minute and you become convinced 
that he knows your inmost thought. There is 
an inscrutable smile on the silver lips, — not 
an unpleasant one, — and a quiet and repose of 
feature and of hands, those telltale members of 
god or human, that seem far, oh, so far away 
from — trolleys, for instance, from automobiles, 
aeroplanes, and submarines. 

I have lived in his presence all these years, 
and I frankly admit it is a beneficial one. The 
old gods are to be revered whether Norse or 
Indian. They are forever a symbol of the long- 
ing of the human soul to express a spiritual ideal. 

Perhaps I need not say after this that I felt 
at home with all those postal-card scenes from 
India. 



MY MAIL 121 

7- 

It would seem as if this island acted as a 
centripetal force on the mail from other islands, 
for it comes to me from Australia, New Zealand, 
from England, Japan, or Newport, from Ber- 
muda or Cuba, and spurs me to make myself 
less ignorant, at least of these antipodal islands. 
And yet — and yet — I have to confess that 
never, never by any forced process of memorizing, 
or by long gazing at the map of Australia can 
I remember to name properly the divisions and 
their capitals ! 

But that emigrant ship from England carrying 
to that land of promise dear old Peggotty, Mr. 
and Mrs. Micawber, all the blessed contrari- 
ness of Mrs. Gummidge, all of little Emily's 
broken heart and broken life, takes me forth- 
with to that island continent. When I was a 
child I learned by heart those paragraphs 
which include the description of the sailing of 
that emigrant ship. It is one of the best 
things ever written by Charles Dickens's always 
busy pen. 



122 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

And then Australia is very real to me through 
one of her voices. Australia means Melba 
and all the hours she has made golden for me 
with her golden voice. Somehow, I always 
hear the whole Australian land singing with 
that voice, singing its way up from a life begun 
in wretchedness into the light of a golden day. 

On the contrary, I never think of Mrs. 
Humphry Ward as born in that land. Rather 
she seems a product of some Westminster- 
Catechism-bounded, Church-of-England-over- 
shadowed, Puseyism, Newmanism, Matthew 
Arnoldism irrigated desert country where there 
are no heights or depths, but just the long 
parallel irrigation ditches of a two-ideaed doc- 
trinaire : a man's soul versus the strait jacket 
of the Church, a man's soul versus the political 
labyrinth of the State. Not that I find no 
enjoyment in Mrs. Ward's work. I do — in 
spots ; but I wonder how she can harp so long 
on those two strings without wearing them 
thin. 

When I go through those works in thought, 
I can but marvel that so many pages should be 



MY MAIL 123 

read, yes and re-read, by the reading public 
when from the first page to the tenth or twelfth 
thousandth there is not a line of redeeming 
humor. I never could see much beauty in an 
irrigation ditch, but I know that it is most useful 
and productive of much good to humanity in 
general. And even on this point I feel that I 
should not find fault. She is as she is, and to 
ask her to be otherwise is asking the impossible. 
I really want to be fair in this matter. 

Curiously enough I feel that I know the dis- 
tinctive feature of the Australian land of wonder 
and mystery, the Australian "bush"; for I 
read quite recently a story of "Billy" — the 
biography of a little kangaroo that was partially 
tamed. Through Billy's bright little eyes I 
have seen the "bush". For this I am deeply 
indebted to Billy's biographer. 

8. 
It is interesting — this mail from these dis- 
tant lands ; but the home letters are those that 
refresh and strengthen me ; to them I look 
forward with an eagerness not to be known 



124 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

except by those who really live the year round 
on an island. There is always a bit of romance 
attending the arrival of the boat. I look out 
over the harbor and watch for her to round the 
Point. There she is ! My temperature rises 
a little with each arrival. What will she 
bring to me ? Love and friendly greetings, news 
and a good wholesome bit of gossip from an 
intimate woman friend, or some royally hearten- 
ing words from a masculine one. 

The other day there came in quite unex- 
pectedly an Indian five-act drama from a fine 
boy in a northern state. He wants to know 
if it gives sufficient promise for him to choose 
literature for his career. 

Ah, poor laddie ! You are only seventeen, 
and I must write and tell you the truth : "Litera- 
ture is a good staff, but a poor crutch", and I 
would far rather, in these times, that you 
should take plus your college training in " litera- 
ture" a full course in practical agriculture; that 
you should know how to till, and plant, and sow 
and reap a harvest ; that you should take your 
scholarships, gained by steady effort, and invest 



MY MAIL 125 

in two acres of land that you can call your 
very own and, after college is over, proceed to 
cultivate them to the best of your ability — rather 
this than to devote your young idealism wholly 
to a literary career. 

I shall say to him : "If this desire be in you, 
if you are both equipped and endowed to work 
along this line, then work you will — and no 
demon of chance and no hoeing of potatoes, 
no digging of the same, no sorting them over, 
no barrelling and marketing them can hinder 
you of your 'providence' in the profession of 
literature. No ; if that special gift be yours, 
you will compose better, indeed, while you are 
sorting over potatoes than if you were placed in 
surroundings supposed to be ideally perfect for 
such production. I could substantiate this truth 
by a cloud of witnesses, for it is well known." 

For all these letters and the many, many more 
that come to me here — thanks to their senders, 
one and all. It is always a delightful feeling, 
this of being remembered by those whose faces 
we may not see. And if these many, many 
letters — most of them — remain unanswered 



126 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

for a year, two years, three, even ten, perhaps 
during an indefinite lifetime, lay not the sin 
of forgetfulness at my door. Remembrance is 
my penance. 

I do not like to write letters, only to receive 
them ; and here again I realize I am not 
"playing fair". 



IX 



A LITERARY MOLOKAI 
I. 

In the southwest corner of the square on the 
map that is bounded by latitude 41 north and 
71 west of Greenwich, there is a tiny, insignifi- 
cant island known as No Man's Land. At 
times it is uninhabited ; at present there is but 
one family on it. It looks across intervening 
waters and one of the Elizabeth Islands to 
Penikese, the island colony for lepers. 

I should like to ship to this island of No 
Man's Land every copy of a book that may be 
classed as leprous literature, as well as all those 
that show the slightest symptom of that disease 
— send them thither and destroy the plates. 
I say "literature", and do not include dime 
novels and matter forbidden transportation 
through the mails. 

It is not necessary to go into particulars of 

127 



128 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

this special disease according to the manner of 
some litterateurs now writing. I will refer any 
one who may desire to study analogous symp- 
toms to read of the condition existing in the 
Hawaiian Islands only a few years ago, or to 
Leviticus XIV. I think he will find all the 
details necessary. 

This special, forced migration is intended 
only for the literary offspring of those men 
who, to-day, for want of better expositors of 
what is true literature, are classed as authors 
of some of the best modern work. 

As up to the present time no cure has been 
discovered for this special disease in letters, it 
would seem wise to remove these books from the 
body politic — pro bono publico — by segrega- 
tion. This class of literature infects the mind, 
a process of corruption that in these days of 
learned psychiatry is affirmed to be more danger- 
ous than mere bodily infection. 

Were it in my power I would ship every book 
— every novel, every play, every club report, 
every printed lecture and discussion (all these 
written for and discussed by the laity, be it 



A LITERARY MOLOKAI 129 

understood) that, whether in English, German, 
Swedish, Norse, French, Italian, or Russian, 
exploits in any fashion the so-called "sex- 
problem" of to-day. I write the word "ex- 
ploits " intentionally. 

Against the authors personally I have nothing. 
I do not know them personally and what I 
know of them is generally to their credit as 
men. What I say here is in regard to their 
works ; they are held responsible for the in- 
fluence of what they produce. 

2. 
There is a humorous side to these moderns' 
"output". Reading their plays and novels 
one would receive the impression that their 
creators are hardly yet fully awake to the fact 
that this earth has been peopled for many 
thousands of years. Scientists differ as to the 
time, but this is a matter of no moment; the 
main fact being that this world has been very 
generally peopled, to what extent we, with 
our small amount of actual knowledge, as yet 
cannot affirm. Recorded history is so very 



i 3 o FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

recent, and recording strata also young com- 
pared with the age of the world. And before 
that — who knows what "before that" ? 

These writers seem not to be aware of the 
fact that the cave man, the cave woman must 
have been as acutely conscious of sex as the men 
and women of to-day. True, they did not write 
about it, throw a glamour over it, halo it about 
with rays of attempted enlightenment for the 
cave public; nor did they conceive that they 
were on a level with their contemporary beasts 
and trust to the "unerring instinct of the 
brute". They accepted the fact that they 
were created men and women as natural, not 
unnatural, and made no literary attempt, so 
far as we have discovered, to denaturalize that 
fact. To read some works by certain authors 
of the present one might be led easily to believe 
that To-day is the first day of the first man, 
the first woman, the first bird, the first beast 
of the field. One is forced to ask : "Where 
is their insight into Life?" Not London life, 
not Parisian life, not the similitude of life on the 
stage of the Adelphi, but Life as a whole. 



A LITERARY MOLOKAI 131 

What they offer to you, to me, to the reading 
public in general, appears to be a simulacrum 
of Life galvanized by artificial instinct. It 
reminds me of the muscles of a frog's leg severed 
from the body, twitching in a semblance of 
life from the application of the electric current. 
The frog is real ; the leg is real ; the twitching 
is very real — but there is nothing animate in 
the experiment. 

I concede Life is not easily "seen into". 
But one fact has established itself without ex- 
traneous help of author or playwright : this 
earth of ours has been abundantly peopled for, 
as yet, uncalculated time, and in the long course 
of the ages has proved an abiding-place, such 
as it is, for countless millions and billions of 
human beings, at least from their birth till 
their death. 

3- 

I believe if one could question those countless 
millions individually concerning their life- 
experience, that those would be in the minority 
who would dare to deny that Life meant to 
them, at some time, some kind of hope — 



132 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

whether of food, improved circumstances, of 
joy of mating, of loyalty to some ideal, if 
that ideal were only the artistic ideal of the 
cave man who drew with sharpened flint on the 
wall of his cave; that, having had that hope, 
that ideal, they experienced something that 
made life not only endurable but desirable, at 
least for a time. 

I believe they would admit — and my be- 
lief rests on the evidences in my contemporaries 
about me, on the evidences, also, in the revela- 
tion on stone, papyrus, parchment, or paper, in 
pigment, marble, or bronze, of generations of 
men and women for more than three thousand 
years — that, crushed by adverse circumstances, 
buried by earthquake, overwhelmed by tidal 
wave, subject to cataclysms induced by the play 
of great natural forces ; often hungry, cold, 
miserable, worn in the devious ways of life, 
broken by toil ; many times starved by famine 
in the land, or swept out of existence by war 
and pestilence, their bodies tortured, imprisoned, 
or left on the field like broken, discarded gourds, 
they, too, mulct of living by Life nevertheless 



A LITERARY MOLOKAI 133 

could say, " I lived — if only for a day, an 
hour. I played the man and not the coward. 
I had moments of bliss. I can honestly say 
that I would rather have lived than not to have 
known existence with all its handicaps, its dis- 
appointments, its misery, its long-continued, 
bitter toil for scant rations, its fighting struggle 
for mere existence. For, so long as I had a spirit 
within me that made me the man, and not 
wholly the animal, I had some hope, some 
ideal : once a woman loved me ; a child called 
me father ; once I was fed — full ; once a man 
or woman spoke a friendly word to me. I made 
one song and the singing filled my soul with 
joy, although afterward the remembrance was 
as ashes in my mouth. I wrought one statue 
and rejoiced, discontentedly content in my work. 
Once I asked for bread and was given a stone 
and, starving, I wrought from that stone a 
masterpiece." 

4- 
Looked at from the right angle, through a 
normal medium, there is no such problem as 
the "sex-problem". The facts in evidence do 



134 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

not constitute a "problem" to be solved. There 
is no solution. What is termed "sex" is a 
force, and like gravitation it solves itself. New- 
ton formulated a law; but gravitation existed 
before the law; worked securely without the 
law ; and no formulating of that law has changed 
by a hair line the ellipse of the ecliptic — nor 
ever will. It is true we can calculate disaster 
but not avert it. We may not put to rout 
aeons of the work of evolution, much misused 
word, with any discussion of this so-called 
"sex-problem", or by any formulating of laws 
for the same, or by its exploitation in novels 
and plays. 

What windy nothings seem words, appeals, 
attempts, suggestions, attempted solutions, over 
against this miraculous force ! — it is the attempt 
of the ant to fill the living crater of Kilauea. 

5- 

What astonishes me most in connection with 
this subject is the colossal narrowness of these 
writers' outlook on life, not to speak of their 
want of insight. Love, faith, joy, hope, sacri- 



A LITERARY MOLOKAI 135 

fice, duty, " respectability", which spells for 
certain of them Puritanism, Philistinism, and 
Hypocrisy, are anathema ; romance, ditto ; 
poetry tinged with romance, ditto ; sentiment, 
ditto. They believe all these to be manifesta- 
tions of untruth. Well, that is their point of 
view. Their world is a "charnel house"; their 
humanity is "worm-eaten"; life to be life as 
they conceive it should follow the "unreasoning 
instinct of the brute"; womanhood — but I 
won't write that for the sake of my own woman- 
hood. Shakespeare is "crude" in his interpre- 
tation of life — he indulges in "sentiment"; 
Thackeray makes of its end a "sentimental lie". 
O gentlemen, gentlemen ! Were what you 
affirm in so many, many words that one is 
almost hypnotized by them into belief, this 
humanity of ours could not exist, for the main- 
spring of life would suddenly stop — short. 

6. 

A complete statement in a few words of the 
process by which this leprous literature has been 
and is being evolved is contained in one sen- 



136 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

tence that was written with no reference to 
this subject. Indeed, to apply it, I have re- 
versed the quotation. An author of this class 
of literature "simply puts an emphasis on the 
facts that constitute his body rather than on 
the facts that make him a man." (The quota- 
tion, taken from one of the Ingersoll Lectures, 
"On the Hope of Immortality", by Mr. Charles 
Fletcher Dole, to whom I am indebted for the 
sentiment that, reversed, applies to this ap- 
parently antipodal subject, is as follows: "He 
simply puts his emphasis upon the facts that 
make him a man, rather than upon the facts 
that constitute his body.") 

Take a few of these English-writing authors 
of To-day, — it is not possible in a few pages 
to open up the subject through German, French, 
or other foreign language ; that would be a task 
for months. 

One writes with "distinction" of this so- 
called problem, but with a caul over his soul. 

A second, with an excursiveness that reminds 
me of Mr. Barrett Wendell's phrase, "the 
elusive swirl of thin verbiage", plays about the 



A LITERARY MOLOKAI 137 

subject with a cloying cleverness that no longer 
deceives and in a little while will hardly amuse. 

A third writes with real craftsmanship, but — 

There may be seen in the Dresden Green 
Vaults a work that also shows "real craftsman- 
ship" — a production in wax of the "Visita- 
tion of the Plague", from life. With the help 
of this most careful workmanship the matter 
presented is true in every detail ; nothing is 
omitted. There may be seen the beginning, 
progress, waste, discolorations, contortions, 
death agonies, not in one specimen but in 
several. . No one denies the craftsmanship, 
but — ! 

7- 

We might like to ask at this point, "What 
does make the man ?" Surely the time has 
come to ask this in all earnest. 

We know pretty thoroughly what constitutes 
the body. This body has been analyzed, sub- 
jected to chemical test; we know its elements, 
what makes its ash. And by the bye the thing 
that animates this body eludes all analysis, 
escapes from the retort, is wanting in the ash, 



138 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

is not found in any combination of chemicals, 
cannot be captured or coaxed to revivify the 
combined elements that go to the making even 
of one grain of corn. 

There is but one conclusion : the mere aggre- 
gation of elements chemically combined into 
the body of a man does not constitute him a 
man. It constitutes him an animal of which 
Darwin says : "The structure of man is the 
final form in physiology." 

What is it makes the man as we know him, 
as we see him daily before our eyes, if not 
honest labor of whatever kind, honesty of pur- 
pose, word, and deed ? The endeavor to fulfil 
as best he may in the circumstances the law of 
existence, to marry, found the family, clothe 
and feed his children until they are able to clothe 
and feed themselves ? What is it but to set 
before those children an example of work, 
work, and always work, and to teach them that 
a life lived without it is no life ? To acknowledge 
that man sins because he is human; that he 
fights because he is wronged; that he creates 
for himself his own heaven and hell and that 



A LITERARY MOLOKAI 139 

he must be a tenant of one or the other on this 
earth, or, paradoxically — on account of the 
spirit warring with the flesh — a tenant of 
both ? To set before his children a standard 
of decency in living because he is a man and 
not wholly a brute; to cultivate loyalty to his 
friends, loyalty to his special country, reverence 
for his creation — I may not define here con- 
cretely because I do not know how ; that he 
be willing, not forced to be willing, to recognize 
men as his brothers, and, recognizing them in 
common brotherhood because they are human, 
be logical enough and brave enough and generous 
enough to admit with every breath he draws 
that he has a Father to whom he is responsible 
for the spirit of man that is in him ? 

8. 
This may seem easy to write; it is not. 
When certain men sitting in their snug study, 
or comfortable library, dip their pens into their 
inkstands and draw a line through the words 
Creator, spiritually created, sin, forgiveness, 
logical result of sin, hope, faith, repentance, 



140 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

salvation of one's self by work in this world, 
and then proceed to enlighten us on the subject, 
for instance, of the "Puritans", it becomes a 
spectacle to make a man who is a man weep 

— or laugh ! All that is easily written by them 

— with one line they erase the hope, the life of 
mankind. 

9- 

I could wish, even, that not only the "touched" 
books of these present day writers — not all 
their works I am thankful to say ; some of them 
are delightful and really give promise of more 
wholesome diet — might be shipped to the 
little island of No Man's Land, but that a few 
of the authors themselves might be induced to 
make a sojourn there for a year or two, depen- 
dent wholly on their manual labor for their 
livelihood. 

Surely the world would be no poorer and No 
Man's Land might be enriched by the fruit of 
their labors. They should be obliged to plough, 
harrow, till, plant, and harvest. They should 
learn in furtherance of their livelihood to fish 
with line and trawl; to dig clams, rake in 



A LITERARY MOLOKAI 141 

scallops, dredge for quahaugs, spear eels, and in 
so doing have the benefit of lungfuls of uncon- 
taminated air. The Atlantic winds might free 
them from all intellectual miasma ; give the true 
man's spirit, half asphyxiated by their present 
intellectual environment, freedom to expand ; 
the salt spume sting their eyes until they watered 
themselves clear of the humors engendered of 
their abnormal and astigmatic outlook on life. 
They might experience on that little island, in 
this air, what it means to earn their living 
literally by the sweat of their brows, — a whole- 
some process, — not by the perspiration that 
is apt to gather thereon when, leaning over a 
desk beneath a lamp, they wrestle with the so- 
called "sex-problem". If these men could live 
for one season on that island, dependent on 
their own efforts for their livelihood, and see 
daily before their eyes the life of the one family 
that finds its maintenance there, I believe they 
would write another kind of book — a whole- 
somer. In the end they might learn a lesson, 
also, from the clams they would dig. 

I respect the clam ; it has certain reserves. 



X 



BY WAY OF CONTRAST 



I. 

"I will lift up my eyes unto the hills from 
whence cometh my help." 

I knew a woman whose story I have been 
tempted again and again to write. It is com- 
monplace. 

She lived in an old, weather-beaten house on 
a remote hill in Vermont. She was married 
early, perhaps as a matter of making one less 
in a none too well provided for household. She 
had her one child, a girl, just before her hus- 
band died. She went back to the old home on 
the hill to work for herself and child, caring, 
meanwhile, for her father and mother. 

She told me that because, after the death of 
her parents, she could not take her child with 
her into the mill, and as she had no one with 
whom to leave her, she was allowed to take 

142 



BY WAY OF CONTRAST 143 

certain work home ; and so spun and wrought 
till the brothers were old enough to care for 
themselves. There were three of them. 

One enlisted and lost his life in the Civil War. 
She mortgaged the old house, the home of her 
parents, and with the money went on to Balti- 
more and brought his body home. The second 
brother was drafted, and there was no money 
to be had to pay the bounty in order that he 
might remain at home to help her. He went ; 
and was sent back invalided for life. The 
third was drafted also. She was enabled to 
borrow money to pay the bounty. He was 
necessary in the home; he helped a little by 
" teaming " for the mill, but he was the kind 
that never "got on". 

Finding she could not work in the mill, care 
for the home and support herself, child, and 
invalid brother, she mortgaged her little home 
once more for a hundred dollars — I think that 
was the sum — and opened a shop in the small, 
front room. She set to work to feed four, 
clothe three, and educate her child. 

In due time one brother married, the other 



i 4 4 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

died ; but not before she had buried her only 
child, a girl who had grown to young woman- 
hood ; had worked in the mill, fighting against 
inherited weakness of constitution, and finally 
succeeding in earning something for herself and 
mother by the use of her voice, a rarely beautiful 
one. That happiness was of short duration — 
a year ; then she, too, was carried from the little 
house on the lonely hill and slept beside her 
father. 

As a child of twelve I idealized work where- 
ever and whenever I saw it ; I imagined how 
delightful it must be to earn for oneself — like 
Kate, this one daughter of the rare voice. One 
day, — I was on a visit to my grandparents, — 
I begged her to take me with her that I might 
work beside her in the mill. She indulged me. 
For three hours I sat on a stool by her side 
trying to do awkwardly what she did so skil- 
fully. It was a hot day. The sun shone into 
the room through the many bare windows be- 
neath which the water roared over the dam 
shaking the mill to its foundations, as well as a 
small girl perched on a high stool before a bench 



BY WAY OF CONTRAST 145 

at which some twenty girls and women were 
at work, their ringers flying at a rate that made 
me dizzy. And what with the dizzying fingers, 
the dizzying of the rushing waters, the hot sun 
shining on them and sending the glaring reflec- 
tion quivering along the ceiling, and the con- 
tinual shaking and trembling of stool and floor 
beneath her, it was a sea-sick small girl who 
was taken down to the door of the mill and 
sent up the hill to the little house for comfort 
and refreshment. 

I never idealized any kind of work after that. 

This daughterless woman was left at last 
with the care of an old, old woman who lived 
to be a hundred and one years lacking a few 
months. She was a relation, and her humble 
home was across the road on that hilltop. The 
two lived apart as was best ; but day after day, 
season after season, year after year as the old 
dame grew more feeble, this undaunted woman 
carried in summer heat and arctic cold a tray 
well-filled from her hard-earned store across to 
her poorer neighbor and relation. She tended 
her, at ninety, through what was supposed to 



146 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

be her last illness. She lived eleven years after 
that. 

In time the old woman died. She, also, was 
brave, strong of spirit, poor — but she, also, 
was glad to have lived. "Don't have me on 
your mind nights, Susan," she used to say; 
"remember it is for me just now as if I were 
crossing that threshold. Don't mind there 
being no light in my bedroom — it makes no 
difference." 

When she was gone her poor home on the hill 
became the woman's who had cared for her. It 
let, off and on, with its small garden for thirty 
dollars a year. But it was only "off and on". 
"If I could have that thirty dollars income 
regular from that house of Aunt L.'s," she used 
to say, " I should feel rich — yes, rick, " she 
added with emphasis. 

Poor she always was, but rich in spirit — so 
rich that people sought her out in that home on 
the hill for inspiration, for jollification, for the 
pure pleasure of hearing something of her marked 
originality, of her good thoughts on many sub- 
jects, of sharpening their wits on hers. 



BY WAY OF CONTRAST 147 

She kept her independence, working almost 
to the last. Twice a year she went to Boston 
to buy goods for her little shop. These were 
gala times for her. Nothing from Bunker Hill 
Monument to the latest play at the theatre es- 
caped her keen eyes. All the city life for that 
one week yielded her a wealth of enjoyment, 
and the relation of that enjoyment gave genuine 
pleasure to many others in that remote North 
Country village. 

She was merry. She was no Puritan, no 
Philistine; yet she was eminently "respec- 
table"; honored for her dignified and sacrificial 
womanhood ; loved for her hospitality, her 
cheeriness, her friendliness, by the hundreds 
who sought her acquaintance. She never spoke 
of her troubles, living or dead, unless to those 
who knew her well enough to speak first of them 
to her, and then never with a note of despair. 

"How can you be so cheerful now that you 
have lost all ?" I asked her one day when I was 
paying her a visit. 

We were sitting at the immaculate table on 
which stood at meal-time, in winter and summer, 



148 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

in the places where her brother and daughter 
were accustomed to sit, two old-fashioned cus- 
tard glasses filled with such flowers as the season 
offered : in winter geranium and its leaves ; in 
summer any little flower from the hillside or from 
her small old-fashioned garden. With a deli- 
cacy I must record, she never when entertain- 
ing a passing guest, and they were many, allowed 
the custard glasses to be on the table. They 
were for her alone — a pleasant companionship 
for her on that hill, but never intended to remind 
others of any sadness of loss. I used to ask 
that they might remain when I was with her, for 
as a child I knew her daughter and brother. 

She looked at me across the table and smiled. 
"My dear," she said, "as sorrow after sorrow 
came and my heart broke after Kate's death, 
I learned a lesson : never to carry my grief into 
another's home or intrude my tears on pleasant 
companionship. I soon saw that I should not 
be welcome to my friends if I went among them 
with a sorrowful face or with tears — and my 
friends are all I have left. I cannot do with- 
out them." 



BY WAY OF CONTRAST 149 

She looked out of the window with eyes that 
saw nothing of the roadway, the bank, or the 
setting sun, and added: "I have cried buckets- 
ful as I have sat here alone — but that is no 
concern of anybody's." 

I, too, learned my lesson then and there. My 
only hope is that I may have profited by it, and 
may continue to. 

2. 

Many a time I have sat on the steep, dark, 
narrow stair that led to her garret and browsed 
in her library, the light falling on the page from 
the open garret door just above me. Her 
library ! — this she called the three book-filled 
shelves that were set, recessed, into what was 
an old window. Instead of boarding it up, she 
had made it into a book closet in the wall of the 
steep stair. Across it was drawn an immacu- 
late white curtain of coarse, starched linen. 

As girl and woman I always had a thrill when 
I drew aside that curtain and sitting down on 
the narrow stair took out a book. They were 
curious, some of them ! Books that had been 
given to her daughter; books that had been 



150 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

presented to the hostess herself; books the 
summer friends, visiting or boarding in the 
mountain hamlet, had left there on the settle 
in the old-fashioned kitchen ; books the minister 
had discarded when he changed his parish ; 
magazines dating from the time of the Civil 
War, given to her by some city friend ; novels in 
paper covers — an olla podrida of literature. 

The library in the wall of the garret stair in 
the little weather-beaten house on that hill gave 
to me "Dora Thorne"(!) and — "Spinoza" 
in translation ! ! These two suffice to show the 
range of its literary gamut. 

3- 

She died eight years ago. She had a serious 
heart trouble — when I knew it I recalled her 
words, "My heart broke after Kate's death." 
As she lived alone, some one had given her a 
telephone which hung by her bedside. Every 
night at bedtime she rang up her nearest neigh- 
bor and said, "Good night, I'm all right", that 
they might not have her "on their mind". 

One night in mid-winter, when the mercury 



BY WAY OF CONTRAST 151 

registered twenty-eight below zero, that tele- 
phone rang at midnight. The neighbors, 
roused from sleep, answered at once; but 
there came no sound. Summoning the doc- 
tor, they hurried down to her. They found 
her on the old settle in the kitchen which was 
the living-room of the house. She had made 
up a fire and tried to do for herself. After an 
hour's struggle during which, with a brave smile, 
she assured them she thought she would " come 
through" — she "went out". 

She was as brave a woman as I have ever 
known. 

She was the prototype — in some things 
only — of "Aunt 'Lize" in "The Wood-carver 
of 'Lympus", and the incident of the praying 
colporteur is an episode in her own life on that 
hilltop. Commenting on my version of it, she 
said : "You didn't make it half strong enough ;" 
then, laughing merrily, for she had a keen sense 
of humor — I believe that was her mainstay in 
life — she added with much impressiveness : 
"Yes, I let him pray right along and I kept on 
kneading. I knew it wouldn't do me any harm, 



152 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

and it was doing him a lot of good to pray for 
me — poor soul !" 

But the "poor soul" was not for her. 

Would you ask that woman if she was thank- 
ful to have lived ? 

4- 

This is not an hypothesis, a theory of life; 
it is a fact of life, although a meagre enough 
sketch of what was so rich in spirit that to think 
of it is an inspiration. There are many mil- 
lions of such facts among those who toil. Pon- 
der a moment this fact : — that the spirit of 
man may be rich, is so divinely constituted that 
it calls itself rich, when the body that is its 
mechanical expression is overwhelmed with care, 
burdened with over-work, starved in part, cold, 
miserable, suffering. 

5- 

As I have gathered strength through this 
woman's life lived among the hills, I can also 
affirm I have been enlightened by the words : 
"If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art 
there. " 

That hell is about us, around us, with us; 



BY WAY OF CONTRAST 153 

we have not far to seek it in prison, in slum, in 
the luxury bought with a woman's honor, in 
the thought of man, in his deeds. We may find 
it without much seeking; sometimes we have 
only to "look at home". 

I was reading only the other day in Scribner's 
Magazine the second paper, by Miss Taylor, of 
the series, "The Man Behind the Bars". 

"Alfred" was a waif. Until he was thirteen 
he knew no helping hand, sleeping anywhere, 
eating when he could find a morsel, struggling 
at that growing age just to get the strength to 
struggle to exist. Then a professional burglar 
held out a helping hand. He literally "took 
him in hand" — and his education landed him 
at an early age in prison. 

Miss Taylor writes: "His fate seemed such 
a cruel waste of a piece of humanity of fine fibre, 
with a brain that would have made a brilliant 
record at any university. But the moral and 
physical deprivations from which his boyhood 
had suffered had wrought havoc with his health 
and undermined his constitution." Thereupon 
followed the prison term. Hard labor and con- 



154 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

finement sowed the seed of disease in the weak- 
ened constitution. 

He wrote to Miss Taylor : " Even in this 
horrid old shop I have some very happy times 
thinking of your friendship and building castles 
in the air." 

After his release he had another long row to 
hoe in his struggle to reestablish himself on a 
footing of existence. Why did he not end it 
all ? What was there in his life to induce him 
to live ? A friend, perhaps, and an encouraging 
word — and surely the spirit of a man. 

He writes again : " Strong as is my love for 
woman, much as I long for some one to share 
my life, I don't see how I can ever ask any 
woman to take into her life half that blackened 
and crime-stained page of my past. I must 
try to find happiness in helping others." 

But the one woman crossed his path ; and when 
he told her all that past she said : "And so 
you were afraid I would think less of you ? Not 
a bit. It only hurts me to think of all that 
you have been through." 

He lived to hear a little boy try to call him 



BY WAY OF CONTRAST 155 

"Father", and a short while after that to lay 
him away. Then Life proved too hard for 
him — for the mechanism of him, not for his 
undaunted spirit. He wrote that he hoped 
"to be able to work again". 

Miss Taylor calls him "a good soldier . . . 
a valiant spirit." 

What would "Alfred's" answer be to the 
question, "Would you rather have existed on 
this earth or not ?" 

Having read some of his letters, I believe we 

know the answer. 

6. 

Over against that woman's life lived among 
the hills, over against this man's life — one of 
thousands lived for a time in hell — this "Al- 
fred", this created thing, part mechanics, part 
spirit, the spiritual part of whom remained 
undaunted when his mechanism failed him, 
place the exposition of what life is by some of 
the present-day writers of fiction — a matter 
of lust, greed, hypocrisy, dulness of the senses 
to all objective beauty, the indifference of the 
beast in man. 



156 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

It is this deadliness of infection, the precursor 
of pestilence in the mentality of our human race, 
that calls for a literary Molokai like No Man's 
Land. 

I may be mistaken, I trust I am. I may lay 
too much weight on the influence of these pres- 
ent-day productions. It may be food for a 
certain coterie appetite only. Let us hope so, 
if only for the sake of the children of To-day 
and those yet unborn. 



XI 



AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD 
I. 

This is the South Shore. Two miles' walk 
or drive from town and one comes to this ultima 
thule of New England's coasts. 

It was my good fortune to find myself there 
one warm October morning. The ocean lay 
open to the sun shining through a light haze. 
The surface water rose and fell in long, long 
swells each one of which, with a marked con- 
tinuity of gentle motion, broke in exquisite 
involute curves along the seemingly unending 
stretch of sand eastward to Tom Never's Head 
and westward to Maddequet. A narrow edge 
of foam outlined on the sands this involute 
movement of the waters. 

The crisping rustle of the slow wave was the 
only sound audible. Not a gull, not a cloud 
flecked the arching sky. There was no sea- 

IS7 



158 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

weed, not a shell on the yellow sands, not a 
white sail on the horizon. The low bank be- 
hind me shut off all view of the silent moors. 
Before me lay the Ocean to the horizon line, 
and ever beyond it southward was that Ocean 
— and still southward, ever beyond. 

Sitting there, I believe the soul of me for a 
space of unrecorded time, — it might have 
been a minute, it might have been but ten 
seconds, — sloughed off its earthly trappings. 
I lost for that indefinite portion of time the 
personality that so often encumbers ; so often 
hinders us in accomplishment ; so often hampers 
us in our relations with others ; so seldom shows 
itself as a perfect medium of expression for 
"one's self". I saw that personality for what 
it is in its relation to the natural world : some- 
thing less than a grain of the sands at my feet. 

Life's worries, its anxieties, burdens, tasks, 
were no part of me for that infinitesimal portion 
of the round of eternity. Its joys, hopes, an- 
ticipations, disappointments were as though 
they had never been. The soul of me stood 
aside and looked on. I realized that what 



AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD 159 

that personality might say or do, how it might 
act, how it might not act at a given time, in 
given circumstances, could not affect the soul 
that has its dwelling apart. This realization 
was but for that space of unrecorded time. 

I do not hold much with dreams, and I dream 
but seldom ; but one remains with me : — I 
was standing on the shore of a great sea, in the 
shadow of one of the pyramids. The sun was 
low in the west, and that shadow was prodi- 
giously projected far, far out across the waters 
to the horizon line. The sense of physical 
isolation was appalling; it was a feeling of 
loneliness I have never in waking hours supposed 
possible. 

I experienced something of this isolation of 
spirit for that moment — if moment it were — 
at the Edge of the World. 

2. 
I took up a handful of the sands and let them 
run through my fingers. Just so small, so ap- 
parently valueless, so insignificant seemed all 
my petty criticisms, my tempest-in-a-teapot 



160 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

indignations, my senseless diatribes against 
this thing, that thing, or the other. I doubt 
at that moment if I could have found a single 
act of my life under the most powerful micro- 
scope, so infinitesimal did all connected with 
this "self" seem out on the South Shore, under 
the arch of that serene sky, in the light of those 
sun-filled waters on the shoals. 

Indeed, the things themselves seemed more 
than trivial. A man's view of the universe, 
a telescope's revelation of another portion of it 
— these seemed but infinitesimal attempts to 
enlarge Infinity. From Infinity to Infinity — 
that is all the best and most eloquent expositor 
of the universe, physical and spiritual, can 
show us, the only road. Why not accept this 
without question ? Why waste a portion of 
our strength, physical and spiritual, in wrestling 
with the Infinite ? It is well to hark back to 
Goethe's words : "Man is not born to solve the 
problem of the universe, but to find out what 
he has to do ; and to restrain himself within 
the limits of his comprehension." 

These words bring comfort. 



AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD 161 

3- 

Feeling so very small, so utterly insignificant, 
so wholly useless out there on the sands cast up 
from the shoals, I began to regret what I had 
felt about the work of men who write not ac- 
cording to my way of thinking, narrow as this 
must seem and sound. For a few minutes such 
was my feeling of unworthiness to think a 
thought, much less utter a word, about any 
living human being's accomplishment in this 
world, that I was minded to retract what I 
had thought and said of it. I was even 
for allowing poor Ibsen, Nietzsche, Strindberg 
and Company to thrive like green bay trees 
in their attempts to present certain problems 
of this universe for solution — but I caught 
myself up in time. 

No ! Nirvana is not for me any more than 
it was and is for them. They, and I, and all of us 
humans must stand the test, "What is excellent 
by God's will is permanent". So I dare mis- 
quote. What they give of excellence will live, 
what they yield of unworthiness will perish. 
Wait — only wait. 



i62 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

4- 

As for me, I am here to-day, of To-day ; that 
is enough. I recalled my father's word to me 
when my small six-year-old world suffered 
transient eclipse through some fancied woe : 
"Come out into the sunshine." 

"Yes," I exhorted myself, "come away from 
all that leads you into the realm of the anni- 
hilated individuality. ' Stick to your sure trot. ' 
Keep your house as best you can ; cook, dust, 
sew, and between whiles manage to earn your 
livelihood in a legitimate way. Care for those 
you love ; try hard to care a little for those you 
do not love who may need you even if you think 
you have no need of them. Keep your friends 
— an art in itself. Be a friend. Live out each 
day in the recognition that another day on this 
earth having been yours, you are the richer in 
many opportunities to aid, to comfort, to enjoy, 
and help enjoy. Remember that you have five 
perfect senses with which to enjoy; that you 
need not seek diversion so long as you are blest 
with these. Remember that woman's life on 



AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD 163 

the remote hilltop, and act according to that 
remembrance. " — Ah, if I could ! 

And thereupon I rose, freed myself from sand, 
shook myself together — soul and body ; they 
needed a thorough mixing, as they would not 
amalgamate, after that moment of separation 
at the Edge of the World. Then I drove over 
to Tom Never's Head and so straight over the 
moors homewards. 

5- 

When the little town came into view, so glad 
was I to see it that I was seized with an absurd, 
unreasoning desire to approach a gray shingled 
cottage on the road with the intention of at- 
tempting to hug it; I did in spirit. Had I 
been for two years in exile on the steppes of 
Tartary, home could not have been more wel- 
come to me. Every clam-shell path, every 
sandy lane on that homeward drive looked to 
be an avenue of approach to my earthly para- 
dise. I wanted to greet every scallop fisher- 
man who passed me with "Good-day, brother". 
I wanted to wave my hand to all the school 
children solely to express my joy in their heed- 



164 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

less youth ; to promise every old woman who 
passed me in the roadway a birthday cake; 
to kiss every fat, fair baby that peered at me 
from beneath the hood of its carriage. 

No ! Nirvana, and all that tends to it, is 
not for me. My spirit is gregarious, how aloof 
soever it might have held itself for that lonely 
moment on the South Shore. It is no abiding- 
place for the spirit of us humans — that Edge 
of the World ! 



XII 



A PRIVATE VIEW 



I. 

There is one small room I keep for my private 
picture gallery. It is a quiet room with a good 
light. The dozen or more water-colors and a 
few choice etchings show to advantage on its 
walls. My friends are always at liberty to 
view it privately. 

Here is Number One : A close in an old 
wynd in the ancient quarter of Edinburgh, the 
Cowgate. A bit of clear, cold sky shows high 
between the stone houses blackened by time, 
weather, and smoke. At the right of the narrow 
irregular entrance is an early eighteenth cen- 
tury doorway with wide, recessed triple arch 
and heavy jambs. Sculptured on the stone in 
beautiful Old English lettering you may read: 
Pax intrantibus — Salus exeuntibus. 

165 



166 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

The painting is true in detail and exquisite 
in color. It might be taken anywhere for a 
Drummond. But most significantly beautiful 
to me is the inscription, pathetic, also, for 
this royal welcome is found in what is now a 
slum of Scotland's capital. Peace to those enter- 
ing — Health to those departing. 

I wish I had just such a fine, old stone doorway 
here in Nantucket ! Then I would have carved 
above it : Pax intrantibus — Salus exeuntibus, 
as a "hail" and "health-to-you-in-leaving" for 
my special friends. Indeed, I ought not to 
limit this sentiment of the old Latin inscription 
to the privilegies. I could wish that all who 
should cross our threshold might partake of its 
good will. 

This Number One is a favorite of mine ; I 
saw the original in Edinburgh many years ago. 

2. 

I often turn from a minute study of this 

picture to a painting of Mount Mansfield in 

the Green Mountains. I can conceive of no 

greater contrast in color scheme, subject, treat- 



A PRIVATE VIEW 167 

ment, and sentiment, than is this to the confined, 
narrow, centuries-darkened close in the old Cow- 
gate wynd. 

The season is October. Across miles of 
yellowish brown grass and stubble lands, the 
mountain looms against an eastern sky of in- 
definite blue-gray. It is seen in the low light 
of a sunfilled afternoon. In the nearly level 
rays of that strong sun, a third of its height, 
where the maple-forest belts it, glows transfused 
crimson, subdued here and there by the intrusive 
irregular masses of evergreens. From this mag- 
nificent foundation of transcendent color, the 
mountain's remaining height mantled in newly 
fallen snow gleams with a wondrous purity of 
tint against that indefinite east. 

This work belongs of necessity to the Impres- 
sionist School because of the subject and masses 
of color. 

3- 

Perhaps I ought to say, that there may be no 
unnecessary deception by which any one might 
be led to believe that I am the possessor of 
Corots, Drummonds, Meryons, or Millets, that 



168 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

my little quiet room is only one of my chambers 
of memory and these pictures on its walls are 
a few, very few, among the many of my lasting 
impressions. I have only to enter this little 
room — by day or night, it makes no mate- 
rial difference, the light is always good — and 
there they hang unspoiled in any way by time, 
as fresh in coloring as when the impression 
was first made on the delicate brain-films. It 
was in October, 1905, that I saw Mansfield in 
such glory. 

4- 

We lived for one summer in Switzerland on 
the Lake of Thun. I brought away with me 
several paintings — water-colors, of course. I 
call them the "Lake of Thun Series". 

From our room-balcony, overlooking the lake, 
the three monarchs faced us : the Eiger, Moench, 
and Jungfrau — a summer's vision of rose- 
gleam at eventide, purple and white at dawn, 
of undulating violet and blue in the mists that, 
at times, half hid, half revealed them, of cold 
gray-white under cloudy skies, and the ethereal 
gradations of rose, violet, purple, and gray at 



A PRIVATE VIEW 169 

the departure of the afterglow, in the rising of 
the pale, full moon. 

Across the lake, only two miles distant, the 
Niessen rose seven thousand feet, seemingly 
from the water's edge; in reality there is a 
plain of approach. Day after day an artist 
in the house attempted to catch and render 
permanent in color something of the transient 
beauty of that mountain. It became a matter 
for despair ; a second, and a new combination of 
colors was necessary; a minute, and the trans- 
formation was complete — proportion, shape 
even, must be altered. There were sketch 
suicides by the dozen during that summer; 
but the Niessen was not to be captured. 

Oh, that marvellous, unbelievable play of 
color in the diaphanous mists that trailed across 
it, wreathed its summit, lay on its flanks ; that 
half veiled it; that rose and fell like a tide 
from the lake about its base; that banded its 
green with purple; subdued its purple with 
gray; tinted its gray with violet, touched its 
smoke-topaz with bronze ! Oh, the clouds that 
swept across, over, around, and above it ! They 



170 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

were "shepherded" on its green slopes, or cap- 
ping its summit were tinged now and then by 
the palest rose, a reflection from the evening- 
glow on snow-crowns of the monarchs at the 
head of the lake. At times, the seven thousand 
feet of mountain nobility — those who know 
the Niessen will recognize the truth of that 
word "nobility" — were blotted out in dense 
rain-clouds. 

There is another I have named my "tout- 
ensemble-multum-in-parvo" sketch. It recalls 
what we saw daily from our balcony, weather 
permitting : in the foreground are the heavy- 
timbered, brown roofs of the village houses ; 
beyond, the little chateau beneath the cypress, 
and its walled gardens extending into the lake 
across which the Niessen shadows the waters 
beneath it till they gleam translucent, a pave- 
ment of pure beryl. And beyond lake and 
intervening mountains, whose alps show emer- 
ald in the sunlight, loom the three white giants 
filling all the eastern sky. 

I have only to look at this, and I hear the 
moving tinkle of herd-bells. 



A PRIVATE VIEW 171 

5- 

My home in the Green Mountains stands at the 
meeting place of three roads or, better perhaps, 
the triple forking of the highway from the village. 

The main one slopes northwards and down- 
wards to the bridge and the river. Another 
looks eastwards up a steep slope between high 
grass-hills — upland pastures for sheep and 
cattle ; the vista is closed by the skyline resting 
on the road at the top ! The third curves 
southwards up a long, hard rise. One side of 
the road is set, by nature, with butternut, maple, 
elm, and roadside "brush". The other is 
fenced ; and below the fence broad hill-pastures 
slope to the river beyond which the hills, broken, 
overlapping, follow the course of the " White" 
branch of the Connecticut into the heart of the 
mountains. 

This third road was constantly changing in 
aspect with the seasons. It was at all times a 
delight. A sketch of it, as I saw it in November 
a few years ago, hangs on the walls of my private 
gallery : — The snow is falling thickly. The 



172 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

ground is covered. The anatomy of the trees 
shows dimly dark in the storm. The day is 
windless. Down the curving white hill-road, 
beneath the indefinite, overhanging branches, a 
large flock of sheep is being driven to the village. 
Their fleece shows a dun, yellowish gray in the 
universal white. The man who is driving 
them is suggested merely, for the snow is falling 
so thickly. 

6. 

A really choice etching shows the Chicago 
River near its entrance into the lake : — The 
blackened warehouses, the dark sluggish water, 
the cobweb of mast and rigging; and out in 
the lake a glimpse of a leviathan whaleback, 
all seen — as I have seen it so many times — 
through smoke of tugs, under lowering, smoke- 
filled skies. 

7- 

Another is of Birmingham, England ; just a 
glimpse such as one might obtain from a car 
window as the train draws to a standstill : — 
An overlook on black chimney-pots, soot-black- 
ened houses, dark back yards filled with un- 



A PRIVATE VIEW 173 

namable refuse in an all-pervading atmosphere 
of smoke and grime. In the yard directly 
beneath the track, — from that vantage ground 
I received the impression, — two men are locked 
savagely in a brute struggle ; women lean from 
the narrow black casements above them. 

8. 

Far away in Scotland there is another lake I 
love — Loch Earn and its clachan of St. Fillans. 
This impression also will remain with me to the 
end. 

The Earn rushes from the lake at the "lug 
o' the loch". The surrounding heights are 
purple and rose, for the heather is in full bloom. 
The lintels of the low, stone houses, mere huts, 
are covered with the great yellow disks of 
Gloire de Dijon roses. The mountains outline 
the shore so closely that they leave but one 
narrow space for a roadway between the lake 
and the gray houses hunched against the heights. 
Beneath some lindens on the level river bank 
three lassies are beating their linen white on 
large, flat stones. 



174 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

9- 

There are so many lovely works on the walls 
of memory ! But in this little special room 
there is space for only a few more. Their titles 
will give a hint of their beauties. 

Bass Rock off the Scotch coast in a September 
gale and thousands of gulls seeking refuge on it. 

A funeral procession in Venice. I saw it 
from a gondola as we were passing beneath 
the Bridge of Sighs : white gondola, white cata- 
falque covered with white roses, priests in white 
robes — suddenly rounding a dark turning of 
the narrow canal. A shaft of yellow sunshine 
falls athwart the procession and lights the dark 
green waters. 

Two etchings. One of the Ghetto in Frank- 
furt, when Ghetto signified, in truth, as to city 
districts, "separation". The other is the Mer- 
cato Vecchio in Florence before modern im- 
provements had in part despoiled it. 

I may not describe them all. But the Kana- 
wha Valley has one to its credit ; and Altoona 
among the mountains of Pennsylvania, as I 



A PRIVATE VIEW 175 

saw it at midnight, in deep snow, and the fierce 
glare of the coke furnaces staining the whiteness 
blood red. 

Nantucket, of course, has already several. 
One shall suffice ; it is so homely, and insular, 
and cozy, and Nantuckety ! A tiny lane, cob- 
ble-paved. The gable of a small barn takes up 
a part of one side ; it is overrun with the vines 
of the wild grape. A load of hay fills the lane 
from side to side, and beyond it, down the short, 
steep slope are the blue waters of the harbor 
and the white sail of a catboat closing the vista. 



XIII 



THE WINDS 



I. 

Eheu — eheu — eheu ! 

No, I have never known before that the wind 
had a gamut of its own — basal note, overtones, 
undertones, octaves, sharps and flats ; that it 
can drone like a bagpipe, shrill like a police- 
man's burglar alarm, howl in three keys, roar 
with the noise of a thousand blast furnaces, 
screech like a Brobdignagian Banshee, squeak 
like a troll, thunder as well as croon in the 
chimneys, find a crack in a seemingly tight 
window frame and issue through it into one's 
bedroom in the crescendo-diminuendo tremulo 
of a screech-owl. 

I never knew before that it could "confuse 
one's head", deafen one to all noises but its 
own, even drown thought in its mad chaos of 
sound. 

176 



THE WINDS 177 

Yes, it can do all this and do it thoroughly, 
with a whole-heartedness that would be admi- 
rable if exerted in another cause. 

2. 

The great winds in Dante's Inferno have 
always been to me very impressive, very poet- 
ical, but they are in print; they are not the 
winds that sweep over this island. ^Eolus, 
also, has some notable winds that he let loose 
in the ^Eneid ; they, too, are poetical, but arti- 
ficial. We rarely have that kind here. 

Now and then in summer we have a gentle 
ten-mile-an-hour breeze that cajoles us for a 
time into thinking it is going to continue, and 
that for the rest of the season we are safe from 
any rude force. But generally it races over the 
moors at the rate of twenty miles hourly, increas- 
ing to thirty-five out of sheer caprice and set- 
tling down to a forty-mile pace to which we have 
become accustomed ; we find no fault with it. 

At times, with due warning, it increases its 
steady-going pace to fifty, fifty-five, and sixty 
miles an hour. There is apparently no wrath 



178 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

manifest in this ; it merely shows what it can 
do when something out of the ordinary is ex- 
pected of it. On such occasions, the "out-of- 
the-ordinary" is "no boat leaving Nantucket". 

3- 

Unexpectedly, at intervals, it arises in sudden 
wrath — wherefore I have not the faintest idea. 
Weather-bureau "areas of high-pressure and 
low-pressure" have nothing to do with these 
particular ebullitions of ours ; no storm signals 
are displayed by any order from Washington. 
The wind simply arises in its wrath and per- 
forms one of its offices on this earth : that of 
blowing at the rate of seventy miles for every 
sixty minutes. I wonder sometimes if it has 
itself got wind — via some wireless of its own — 
of a young hurricane's birth in the West Indies, 
and is determined not to be outdone by such a 
pygmy ; or has it heard from some bird of pas- 
sage that a cyclone is contemplating the devas- 
tation of a large tract in Kansas and, believing 
in competition, starts in to compete ? How- 
ever that may be, blow it does — I might say 



THE WINDS 179 

for all it is worth, but that would not be accord- 
ing to evidence, for it has yet greater "stunts" 
to show us. 

My young girl friends laugh at me good- 
naturedly on account of my misuse of a phrase of 
modern slang. They assert it is orthodox to say 
a "corking stunt". I, on the other hand, insist 
on reversing that phrase and hold that nothing 
less than a "stunting corker" can express 
certain meanings. I feel convinced that if they 
lived here at those rare times when the wind 
from the southwest is blowing at the rate of 
seventy-two miles an hour, with an extra puff 
of ninety, they would understand that my slang 
is much more to the point than theirs. That 
wind of the twenty-second of February, 191 2, 
was most emphatically a "stunting corker". 

But at this rate of seventy miles, I look to 
see if the window frames show any sign of blow- 
ing in, or if a passing carriage when it issues 
from the lee of the house will turn turtle in the 
street. 

Nothing of the kind happens. All sorts of 
vehicles pursue their way undisturbed. I have 



180 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

noticed that even the horses' tails do not blow 
sideways under the nearly eighty pounds pres- 
sure to the square inch, and the drivers' caps 
never make a motion to leave the heads beneath 
them. The window frames and panes are 
intact. The wind subsides as quickly as it 
arose and resumes its steady jog. 

I 
4- 

I understand now why these old town houses 
stand four-square, without additions of any 
kind save a small lean-to, to the winds that blow. 
Even the steady nerves of the pioneers might 
have been a little shaken if the wind, in its 
wild sweep over this island, had caught under 
wide, overhanging eaves or beneath any ex- 
traneous roof over an open space. 

These houses, one and all, shake under the 
impact of the heavy wind, shake and give a 
little. Doubtless they were built loose-jointed, 
like the wooden hull of bark or schooner or brig- 
antine, in order to yield a little to the strain. 
(It would be well for us humans to consider 
ourselves built a little that way; we should 



THE WINDS 181 

yield more gracefully under strain and pressure 
of circumstance; there would be less danger 
of collapse after resistance.) I feel sure if these 
houses were not pliable to some slight degree 
in their joints and joists, rafters and uprights, 
they would capsize in some of these gales, or, at 
least, be blown from their foundations. 

But no; there they stand, staunch, and 
square, and squat — most of them — and solid. 
I look anxiously to see the shingles ruffed on 
the roofs like the hooks of a teazle. Not at all. 
Not even a loose one has blown into the street 
in all its length and breadth ! 

I marvel that an old hunched chimney here 
and there does not succumb, at least lose a 
brick from the top layer; that the numberless 
scuttles in the garrets are not lifted from their 
hinges; that numerous "Captain's Walks" — 
the balustraded open promenade on the roof, 
a kind of ridge-pole balcony peculiar to this 
town — are not sailing off into the street or 
harbor. 

Nothing happens. The town after a heavy 
gale is in statu quo ante. In the harbor, to be 



1 82 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

sure, a catboat or rowboat, left to breast the 
storm as best it can, may sink. The low dikes 
on the Point may be overridden by the waves, 
a thousand feet of lumber be floated off the 
wharf ; the beach at 'Sconset or the South Shore 
be eaten away for twenty feet by the force of 
the seas. But, apart from this, there seems to 
be only the terror of the element itself that has 
any effect; nerves suffer most. It is impos- 
sible to sleep on these rare nights of terrific 
storm — I mean when the gale rages at seventy 
miles an hour for eight hours, with gusts of 
ninety to its discredit. 

There is one thing in favor of these winds 
here : they may blow sometimes with hurricane 
force, but it is a steady hurricane movement. 
There is nothing cyclonic about it. If there 
were — 

5- 

It is curious to study the effect of the strong 
persistent winds on the growths of the moors. 
The pine plantations have had a fearful struggle 
to maintain their foothold. Each individual 
tree makes a good fight, but the result, in time, 



THE WINDS 183 

as with us humans when circumstances of envi- 
ronment are too adverse, is dwarfed growth, 
slow development, ofttimes distortion in some 
form. We see these gnarled trunks indicative 
apparently of great age, in height but six or ten 
feet; yet by good pine rights they should be 
in their sturdy prime. 

The wind beats them down as seedlings, keeps 
them down ; yet they, persistently vigorous, 
willing to live in their natural piney way, live 
despite their windy environment, but in the 
struggle for existence become stunted, twisted. 
There is no evidence of youth in them, although 
these plantations date from a few decades 
only. 

Compare with these my two white pines on 
the slope of the hill below my mountain home ! 
They have had the benefit of right environment 
— sunshine, space, a north exposure to toughen ; 
and there they stand, seventy feet of beauty, fifty 
feet of soft, blue-green pine boughs, and a 
straight shaft of a trunk that sends the thought 
to every pillar of strength in Egyptian temple 
or cathedral nave. 



i8 4 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

6. 

The bayberry, also, has its struggle for exist- 
ence. 

I know a spot on the coast of Penobscot Bay, 
near Camden, where I have walked along 
paths that the bayberry overarched. The 
leaves were long, glossy, rich in aromatic 
scent — a fragrance that creates in me a wild 
longing for the sea whenever I catch something 
akin to its pungency from slowly ascending 
incense in an inland church or cathedral. 

Here the bayberry is a lowly, humble thing. 
Beaten down by wind, sustained only on sandy 
soil, it nevertheless makes its own way in time 
and reaches the height of two or, at most, three 
feet. Like the pines it is misshapen ; it has 
turned and twisted in vain endeavor to aspire 
to a greater height. And look at its berries, as 
if they were contemporary with the cave men ! 
They are wrinkled as if with the passing of the 
ages, and hoar as if with the frosts of aeons. 
They are positively uncanny at times. But 
when a bayberry branch, loaded with its irregu- 



THE WINDS 185 

lar swarms of little, wrinkled, gray berries, the 
size of allspice, is laid on the hearth and lighted 
— ah, then they are no longer uncanny in our 
eyes ! They crisp and exude and sizzle as they 
burn with flame of wax and flash of leaf ! Their 
fragrance rises into the nostrils, and all the con- 
centrated essence of the lowly moorland plant- 
life seems to ascend as in incense from the home- 
hearth. 

7- 
Last Christmas evening I made a bayberry 
fire, feeding the first large branch on the hearth 
with another and yet another — and far away 
in the West there were three lovers of these 
moors who, with a precious tiny branch, did the 
same for two households. In the west of the 
Empire State there was still another hearth 
from which a little branch of that same bay- 
berry sent its incense-smoke up chimney. And 
one there was, a lover of the moorland in 
all its moods and tenses, but without a home- 
hearth on which to burn so much as one wee, 
wizened, waxen, gray berry — who, nevertheless, 
enjoyed the flaming hearthfire in spirit. And 



1 86 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

who shall say that that enjoyment yields less 
than does the material ? 

8. 

The wind was rising as I laid the last branch 
on the hearth, rising in its might as we were well 
aware by midnight. Then it was that we of 
the island looked to our fires, covered carefully 
the embers on the hearth with ashes ; ran the 
furnace as low as consistent with a decent 
amount of comfort. Then it was that windows 
were wedged before we "turned in" ; doors well 
fastened ; all things made tight and close-hauled 
to outride the increasing gale. 

All that night it howled across the moors 
from the eastern main. Hour after hour its 
force increased. Again and again I rose and 
looked out into the blackness of the night, just 
for the sake of seeing the gleam and flash of 
my trusty Sankaty beacon. I listened to a 
veritable chaos of sound. It was wind'alone 
— just wind ; no snow, no rattling of wires, no 
jiggling of blinds, no loose board, no rumbling 
under the shallow eaves. No, it was just one 



THE WINDS 187 

steady, roaring howl in which it was hard to 
think collectedly so filled were the ears with 
the steady pressure of sound-waves. 

But Sankaty was there shining fairly brightly 
throughout the night although the spindrift 
obscured its brilliancy and the seas were gnaw- 
ing at the beach below the bluff. In the street, 
the watch — the men who in shifts patrol the 
town on nights of terrific storm as a precaution 
in case of fire — held hardily on their way, 
although a footstep could no more be heard in 
that stupendous onrush of air than could the 
sound of a tiny pebble dropped into the depths 
of the Canyon of the Colorado. 

I have always been amused at the nautical 
expression "the roaring forties". I do not find 
it a subject for much mirth now that I am here 
on this island outpost, for I am experiencing 
what it is to live in them. 



XIV 

LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 
I. 

Any flower that grows for me, grows, I am 
convinced, solely by the grace of God. 

Through no tending, no care, no watchful- 
ness of mine will they flourish and bloom. If 
now and then a blossom shows itself in an apolo- 
getic manner, if a sudden blooming of dahlias 
surprises me after I have given up hope even 
for a few, if a belated rose puts forth from a 
leafless stock, I am joyfully and profoundly 
grateful to the processes of nature that have 
produced them ; but there remains an humble 
recognition on my part of my limitations in 
floriculture. 

I can raise puppies, kittens, if absolutely 
necessary, and chickens whether necessary or 
otherwise — I really think unendingly. I never 
"keep poultry", but I have raised dozens, 

1 88 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 189 

yes, hundreds of chickens by the natural method 
simply for the pure enjoyment of browbeating 
obsessed hens into "staying put", of conquer- 
ing and, I must confess, being conquered. 
Somehow it is never humiliating for me to be 
outwitted by a hen. She is of my own sex and 
her wiles are known to me ; we are well mated 
when we strive for the mastery. 

There was always method in my — to the 
household — seeming madness. About the first 
of March I visited certain neighbors and asked 
if they had a good, sitting-inclined hen to sell. 
I generally found six ancient dames of whose 
torment their owners were glad to be rid. 

One, I remember, was a spasmodic producer 
and always laid on the top of a box, in a cold 
shed. In winter if the egg by chance remained 
on the top of the box, it was frozen ; otherwise 
it rolled to the shed floor and was useless. After 
the laying period was over, this worthy con- 
tinued to sit on the bare box-top trying to hatch, 
so far as any one could see, merely splinters. 
It was a simple charity to provide her with a 
clean tomato box, sweet hay, a warm nest and 



190 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

thirteen eggs of Black Orpingtons that cost me 
two dollars for the dozen and one. 

I merely gave to her the desired work and tried 
to enable her to fulfil her mission of hatching 
out chickens. But my intentions were not 
accepted in that light by this special hen. She 
wished to sit on a bare box-top and indulge in 
imaginative hatching. It seemed to me, as I 
watched her manceuvrings to get rid of all that 
sweet hay, — shoving it to one side of the 
tomato box, working the eggs carefully from 
under her into the same corner with the hay, 
— and deliberately make a business of sitting 
on the bare bottom of that box, that I had seen 
something of these traits of character in human 
beings. I had not so very far to seek. It 
used always to be for me far easier to imagine 
a thing done than to make an attempt to do it 
in the regulation manner. If I did it at all, I 
wanted to do it my own way. 

Recognizing my own shortcomings, I made it 
a matter of fellowship, as well as patience, in 
dealing with this special hen. I patiently filled 
hot-water bottles and kept the ignored eggs 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 191 

warm until such time as the old dame could 
be put back on them and tied down to her task. 
At this point, she unaccountably developed 
an extra set of muscles by which she could raise 
herself one inch from those costly eggs and, 
remaining in that position, allow a cooling draft 
to play continually over them. 

I tried starving her into sitting on them. I 
tried overfeeding her to make her heavy. I 
tried allowing her to range as far as fifteen feet 
of clothes-line tied around her right leg, pro- 
tected by a bit of flannel, would permit — I 
meanwhile seeing to it that the eggs did not 
get too cool. She chose to remain off the nest 
sometimes one hour, sometimes six. When she 
returned to the small box, — I had to substitute 
a starch-box as it allowed no freedom of move- 
ment, — she invariably stepped on those eggs 
as if she weighed fifteen pounds. 

Of course I had to give it up. I was dealing 
with a natural force, and my pygmy efforts to 
counterbalance it could end only in disaster. 

But she was only one of so many ! There 
were some who insisted upon remaining on the 



192 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

nest from morning till night and from night till 
dewy dawn for nearly the entire period of incu- 
bation. The poor eggs never had a chance to 
cool off as they should in a natural way. There 
was nothing to be done with these but let them 
sit, grow thin, their combs white, their eyes 
ditto, and count the days for their deliverance 
from such obsession. I tried forcible feeding, 
but it seemed to me that the obsession had 
culminated in lockjaw. 

But I enjoyed all this true sport keenly and 
raised chickens by the fifties. I remember that 
I lost but one chicken after hatching. I played 
various roles — and I do not flatter myself when 
I assert that I played them well — during the 
process. I acted as midwife to several unfortu- 
nates who, closely confined in a Plymouth Rock 
shell, as hard, apparently, as the proverbial 
New World threshold of the Pilgrim Fathers, 
peeped continuously within those walls to be 
set at liberty. 

I have improvised incubation in the hour 
after midnight, — I confess to the disgruntle- 
ment and distraction of the household, — with 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 193 

a clothes-line across the attic, a kettle, flannels, 
and a judiciously placed kerosene lamp. 

I have taken advantage of the power of the 
sun's rays, remembering certain proceedings in 
far away Africa, and when the thermometer 
indicated 101 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade 
of a July day, at four in the afternoon, I have 
finished in a truly scientific manner a deserting 
hen's job. 

I have turned strike-breaker, and used the 
oven of the kitchen stove to bring success to a 
worthy cause. 

Somehow I succeeded ; the chickens were 
hatched ; they throve. I lost but one among 
those many. I never paid the slightest atten- 
tion to any rules for up-to-date poultry "feed". 
I read about it as I found it in poultry books and 
Grange Weeklies. I invested in this literature 
until experience taught me that all poultry is 
not alike in its tastes. I fed the fluffy, downy 
balls, so soon as they had dried off, with a 
strictly grown-up diet : cracked corn and water. 
They throve on it, although I confess I had to 
introduce them forcibly to this special diet 



i 9 4 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

because they were only a few hours old and 
needed to be helped to pick and swallow. But 
the digestion proved to be perfect, and, after 
all, that is the chief end in animal life. 

When they were about ten days old and 
scratching with a tenacity of purpose and 
energy worthy of aeons of scratching inheritance, 
I gave them to my neighbors, — all of them : 
Black Orpingtons, Plymouth Rocks, Rhode 
Island Reds, and White Wyandottes. 

I used to present myself with twenty or more 
in my apron at a neighbor's back door. I 
always noticed that the man of the house showed 
real appreciation of my gift ; but the spindle 
side looked at me and the chicks askance. 

I once made bold to ask the reason, when I 
presented an autumn "hatching". I found 
that the spindle side had to prepare the "warm 
mash" — a disagreeable task. I do not blame 
her for feeling aggrieved at my gift. There is 
a limit even to chicken raising. I should 
draw the line at making "warm mash" of a 
winter's morning when the mercury was near 
the bulb of the thermometer and the mash half 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 195 

frozen before it reached the hen house. I said 
nothing about the "cracked corn" diet. Each 
of us makes his own experiment with life. 

2. 

As I have said — I fear in a manner too prolix 
— I can raise anything belonging to the animal 
kingdom, but with flowers, for which I really 
care, I fail ignominiously. 

I have no garden as yet. My back yard with 
its situation, capabilities, and possibilities would 
require a Frederick Law Olmsted to do it 
justice. 

It really has wonderful capabilities for some- 
thing little less inferior to the sloping gardens 
of the Rhine — those you may see just before 
you reach Bonn — or those of the Borromean 
Islands. I see it as it might be, could I afford 
to "dike" it, terrace it, grade it, build a pergola 
for it through the vine-covered vistas of which 
would be seen the gray roofs, the great gray 
chimneys, the little, gray, fishermen's huts of 
that part of the town which lies below Orange 
Street Bank ; and, beyond them, those harbor 



196 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

waters changing, forever changing above shoals 
and channels — indigo, ultramarine, sapphire 
blue, gentian blue, blue of peacock's rings, blue 
of lapis-lazuli, each and severally crossed with 
the pale whitish green of jade, green of Nile, 
green of Niagara above the cave of the winds, 
green of beryl and porphyry. I see it all as it 
can and should be ! Whether it will ever attain 
to such metamorphosis remains doubtful. 

Meanwhile I manage to enjoy it as it is. 

At present a portion of my back yard con- 
sists of stubble from an experimental "vege- 
table patch". Peas, beans, cucumbers, lettuce, 
thrive for me. I plant them — and Nature is 
kind ; she does the rest without much effort 
on my part. I can hoe a row of beans as well 
as any one and enjoy the exercise. But let 
me take between my thumb and forefinger a 
tiny, nickel-plated, up-to-date flower-weeder and 
within ten minutes I am in a state of exhaustion ; 
so are the flowers. Only the weeds seem to 
hold their own under the manipulation of my 
patent weeder. 

It is discouraging to plant — yes, and to 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 197 

water, to hope and anticipate, "Another year 
and they will yield !" and, in the end, see no 
fruition. I turn to my peas and beans for con- 
solation. They yield abundantly and, looked 
at carefully, a bean or pea blossom, though shy 
in blooming, is really charmingly decorative; 
but I cannot pick them to that end and so 
sacrifice future beans and peas ! 

Last year there was a seven weeks' drought, 
and my courage waned in the third week. I 
gave over the garden to Fate. The dahlias' 
little green nubs dried up and fell off. The 
nasturtiums were as if they had not been. 
The trumpet vine bore one superb blossom — 
blew its own trumpet, in fact, to proclaim that 
it lived, and then lost every leaf. The wistaria 
attempted a wholly out of season blossoming, 
— I have become accustomed to this freak blos- 
soming in my garden, — but the attempt proved 
abortive. The rose bushes, "warranted field- 
grown for two years", I found by the first of 
August as mere bare stocks among an enormous 
crop of Bouncing Bets, a legacy from a long- 
neglected, former ownership. They covered 



198 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

the place I call a lawn, rioted in the vegetable 
garden, overflowed down the bank, and gave 
cheer to desolation till they, too, dried and 
showed nothing but a crop of little brown 
pompons. 

The tomato blossoms along a fifty-foot hedge 
of them — I set out thirty-seven bushes for a 
small family — fell off before a tomato could set. 
Some cosmos was lost in dry grass. 

It is hard to cultivate faith, hope, and charity, 
when contemplating such a garden ; to use a 
Western phrase it is a "proposition". Still 
I am always aware of the possibilities of this 
garden of mine — under another owner. 

At least, there was one satisfaction for me 
at this crisis. Having accepted the drought, 
I gave up all care and thought of the garden 
and in consequence found I was accomplishing 
much that in other household directions was 
necessary. The truth is it was no longer on 
my mind. My neighbors have superlatively 
lovely gardens, and they, pitying me, were 
kind. My bowls and vases were filled from 
their largess. 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 199 

But the miracle happened ! right here in this 
desolate, little, back-yard garden. We had a 
few days of rain ; another week of it — I had 
not thought to look at my kiln-dried flora — 
and one morning when I went out to pick a 
ripened cucumber I found my dahlias a-bloom, 
my green tomatoes as big as thimbles, my Sweet 
Alyssum bed a mass of white fragrance. Some 
nasturtiums were as large as the entirely decep- 
tive plates on garden-book covers. The cosmos 
was flourishing; a heliotrope in blossom, and 
one solitary tea rose trying to put forth on its 
leafless stock — in fact, a resurrected garden ! 

I was happily enabled to fill my own bowls 
and vases with my own blooms until the first 
of November. 

3- 

My neighbors' gardens are a joy to me; as 
is every other garden — except my own — large 
and small, on this island. They are unique. 
There are no imitations. You find no dupli- 
cates among them. The owner of a successful 
garden said quite recently to me : "You can 
make anything grow in Nantucket if you try." 



200 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

I accepted this statement with one mental 
reservation pertaining to me and my efforts. 

Beneath the bank there is a garden, a corner 
of which I can overlook from my upper balcony. 
On a pleasant day in midsummer, the scene is like 
a Watteau fete or a Fragonard. Under a group of 
fine trees, little tables with snow-white cloths are 
set forth on the lawn. It is a gathering place 
for the afternoon-tea clans. The light, smart 
dresses, the gayly colored parasols, the coming 
and going, the abundance of bright flowers, 
are worth a journey across the Sound to see. 

The garden adjacent is a riot of color, but 
there is no attempt at formality or orderly 
arrangement. For this very reason I find it 
full of charming surprises. 

4- 

On one of the longer streets, at the corner of 
a lane, stands an old, unpretentious little house, 
weather-beaten nearly black. In passing one 
would not give it a second glance. Turn the 
southeast lane-corner, however, and you invol- 
untarily halt with your hand shading your eyes 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 201 

if the sun be shining. Poppies are there, 
thousands of them — old-fashioned red poppies 
that have sown themselves year after year and 
fill the side yard, a space eighteen feet by thirty 
possibly, with a mass of glowing color. The 
delicate silk-like texture of the petals is trans- 
lucent in the strong sunshine. 

5- 
I have another garden in mind ; it belongs to 
a friend. Great trees shade the fine lawn, and 
in the background the ample, double-doored 
breadth of an old, gray-shingled barn is graced 
with vines and large clusters of shell-pink roses. 
In their season pink zinnias, pink asters just 
touch with color the surroundings of the stately, 
gray house. One lingers long at the tea table 
on the lawn to enjoy the color scheme. 

6. 
Here and there are stately, old-fashioned, 
formal gardens behind ten-feet high brick walls 
nearly smothered in ivy of two generations' 
growth. 



202 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

I know a sunken orchard-garden in the very- 
heart of the town. It is surrounded by old 
stone walls lichened with age. The trees are 
gnarled and wind-bent. The shade beneath them 
on a warm summer day is both deep and restful. 
Many a time have I leaned over the fence on the 
level of the street and feasted my eyes on the 
thrift, the beauty of these trees and their set- 
ting, and the promise of an apple harvest on a 
side street ! 

Above the wall there is another fine garden : 
one large grass plat surrounded by a wide, con- 
tinuous flower-bed that shows the blossoming 
procession of the seasons from the first crocus, 
daffodil, and tulip, through peony, rose, and 
lily, to aster and chrysanthemum. 

7- 
Some of the larger gardens are surrounded by 
hedges of privet, of wild rose, or honeysuckle — 
hundreds of feet of each. Tiny gardens, mere 
side yards, show fences covered with the last 
named. Every little home has its flower, or 
flowers. One, perhaps, may be graced with a 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 203 

wonderful climbing rose that covers the trellis 
over the door, the gable and eaves. Another 
ranks hollyhocks along its old, worn, side walls. 
Here is a small front garden space, ten by eight, 
filled with lilies ; another with nasturtiums ; 
a fourth with bachelor's buttons. Another 
tiny six-by-eight-feet plot at a side door, grows 
a marvellous blue hydrangea four feet high. 

A neighbor's garden down the street shows 
all the old-fashioned flowers in masses. When 
the sun is shining on this garden, I walk slowly 
by just for the sake of the cheeriness and color 
it adds to my day. 

In June the atmosphere is charged with the 
fragrance of this flower incense. The soft sea- 
breeze coming in over the marshes, over these 
gardens large and small, adds an indescribable 
tang to olfactory delight. 

No wonder ! for there are gardens everywhere 
in the town : gardens of yellow broom on the 
cliff-slope above the sea ; gardens of purple 
lilacs all adown the high banks ; gardens of 
quince and grape that seem almost indigenous 
to this island, they thrive so well and with so 



204 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

little care. And in May, on the moors, there is 
one great garden of pink and white arbutus, 
extraordinarily large and rich in fragrance, 
acres of purple and blue violets, acres of bluets ! 
and later a carpet of the tiny blossom of the 

meal-plum vine. 

8. 

But there is one garden to which I give my 
love. I have named it the Iris Garden. 

You may pass into it through a high white 
gate. Close that behind you and you shut out a 
thoroughfare. In part it is a sunken garden ; 
at your left is a large bed of Japanese iris, pale 
blue, white, and yellow, and purple. They 
stand there in a royal grace all their own. 
When, in the moonlight, you leave them to 
follow the stepping-stones laid in the soft thick 
turf, you mount three broad, old, stone steps 
and linger a moment by the ivy-wreathed marble 
sundial gleaming white in the refulgent night. 
Then you pass under a vine-covered arch ; and 
here your feet would gladly stay for an hour, 
for across the lawn, beyond arch and hedge 
and climbing grape, there lies the silvered surface 



LITTLE GARDENS BY THE SEA 205 

of the harbor waters seen over the flattened, 
full-leaved tops of a group of great trees grow- 
ing at the foot of the steep, high bank. 

I have a small engraving of one of Turner's 
most beautiful works. It shows a lake among 
high hills ; into it juts a small rocky peninsula 
which is covered by a wonderful chapel. The 
moon's glory touches the lake along a wide path- 
way, and its light shining through the chapel's 
high, oriel windows transfuses the interior. 
Beneath this is written : Datur hora Quieti. 

In the moon-lighted Iris Garden overlooking 
the sea, one of those "quiet hours" may be 
experienced. 



XV 



LOW TIDES 



I. 

In the economy of nature I know they are 
necessary, but I do not like them. So often on 
Penobscot Bay I have watched the tide-pools 
at the half ebb and marvelled at the lowly life 
that is dependent for existence on that ebb. 

Personally, I, too, have low tides, but to what 
economical purpose I fail to understand. It 
may be possible that I get some sort of nutrition 
from them. — I wonder ? 

Why or how I invariably associate a low tide 
on the seashore with a slum I cannot say, unless 
it be that as a small child the sight of Dorchester 
flats at low tide on a warm day, and the unsightli- 
ness and unwholesomeness of a portion of the 
Back Bay in my native city — a lagoon that 
was subject to a sluggish ebb and flow which 

206 



LOW TIDES 207 

rendered the adjacent streets and the railroad 
tracks parallel with the Mill-dam an abomina- 
tion — made an impression on me that has 
never been effaced. 

These flats were always to be seen from the car 
window when I was going to Cape Cod or to 
New York, to which latter city I was taken 
by my parents sometimes thrice a year between 
the ages of four and eight. 

It is interesting to trace the workings of 
associated ideas and impressions from which 
the law of association is formulated. 

I can say with perfect truth that I felt it a 
disgrace to be obliged to walk through Beach 
or Albany Street, the approach at that time to 
the station. They were not only thorough- 
fares of approach, they were affluents of South 
Cove, one of the notorious slum districts of 
Boston. Somehow, I cannot say how, I knew 
all this. 

I recall the row of deep, dingy basements 
entered by steep flights of steps, the besmudged 
window panes thick with dirt, cobwebs, flies ; 
the black bottles placed on the sill for lure ; 



208 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

the spotted, black greasiness of the steps ; 
the blotched, swollen, discolored faces I used 
to see appear suddenly above the top step, so 
near to me, — I was at that age not over three 
feet above the curb, — and the indescribable 
and sickening odor of liquors, smoke, and foul 
air that came out against me in a tepid puff as 
I passed them. 

Through this purlieu people drove or walked 
to the station. If it chanced that the train, 
after running out a half a mile through mouldy, 
clothes-behung brick walls and the sickening 
sights of South Cove's crowded tenement life, 
came upon Dorchester flats lying slimy-green, 
fetid in the hot sun, baring to the unaccus- 
tomed eye tin cans and city refuse, showing 
boats on their beam ends, and I heard the 
words "low tide", or if the car window was shut 
quite against my desire as the train skirted 
the deadly lagoon, I naturally associated low 
tides with slums, unsightly flats, and the Back 
Bay abominations. 

I recall, also, that once when a child I was 
taken with one of my cousins by an uncle-in-law 



LOW TIDES 209 

for the first time to the region of the wharves. 
Some friend of his was a passenger on a merchant 
ship. The ship was to sail the next day for 
South America ; she lay a little way out in the 
stream. We were rowed out to her. The night 
was dark. I remember the long, quivering 
gleams of yellow light on the water ; they were 
the cabin, mast, and stern lights of the great 
ship. 

On our return we came up through North 
Street, at that time another notorious slum 
district of the city. I remember the uncle 
hurried us on at a pace not suited to our shorter 
legs. There was music of a kind all about us, a 
glare of red lamps, here and there a blazing gas 
jet, the sight of men and women dancing in 
basement or upper hall, and the sound of singing, 
laughing, shrieking from above and below and 
from the saloons around us. Above the con- 
fusion I could hear the "fiddle", the sharp 
click of "clappers", and the chink of what I 
know now to have been "castanets". 

"The pains of hell never gat hold upon me" 
after my childish eyes had once looked on that 



210 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

limbo ; for, somehow, I knew then as well as I 
know now that what my too young eyes 
had looked on that night was "hell", and that 
the home which sheltered my little life, fostered 
in love, was "heaven", and that both were 
made on this earth. 

I doubt if any theology that intimated there 
might be a "better place" or a "worse place" 
than these two of which I had become cognizant, 
could have made the slightest impression on me 
in after years. I only know that all my life 
I have been free from such theological concep- 
tion. At that time there were several years of 
Bible-reading impressions behind me. Nothing 
said in that book about "hell" had any terrors 
for me; but those lovely words containing the 
great truth : " The kingdom of heaven is 
within you", I managed to interpret in my own 
way. They meant to me that my home was 
the kingdom of heaven, and I was within it. 
I was too young to interpret those words dif- 
ferently. 

And looking back over these many years, I 
find no reason to change that point of view 



LOW TIDES 211 

although it has enlarged with the experience 
of things material and spiritual. If the home 
where love reigns be not the nearest thing to 
heaven, be not heaven itself in one of its many 
manifestations, then I do not know it ; and not 
knowing I cannot define it. What satisfaction 
that little story by Tolstoy gives me, "Where 
Love is there God is also." 

2. 

I experience a low tide of feeling when I am 
aware of any marked tendency, whatever its 
expression, that makes for the undoing of the 
home ; that makes for the loosening of the ties 
between father, mother, and children. 

I am not ignorant of the pain, the confusion 
of standards, the miserable inefficiency of law and 
custom that tend to the dissolution of such ties. 
I know something of all three — the man's, 
the woman's, and the child's, for all three have 
told me. In the end, it is to the child my 
heart goes out, the child that came into this 
world through no will of its own, for whom and 
to whom father and mother are responsible. 



212 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

It is this effect on the child that, in the long 
run, tells sociologically ; for the child's im- 
pressions are "more lasting than bronze" 

3- 

Childhood's opportunity is the guaranty of 
good citizenship. Citizenship in its highest 
interpretation is the consciousness of power to 
promote and the will to promote the welfare of 
all. And the welfare of all, considered not as 
an abstract phrase but as a living possibility, 
rests first, last, and always on the welfare of 
the child as the unit of the race. 

Just in proportion to my tidal lowness of 
mind when I am aware of the tendency to dis- 
solution of family ties and consequent dep- 
rivation of the child of its natural right, am 
I rejoiced, refreshed in spirit and strengthened 
in faith when I see a powerful tendency apparent 
to champion first and foremost the cause of 
the child. All child-labor laws, — although those 
at present are inadequate and many times a 
misfit, — all attempts to win the child from the 
lure of the streets at night, all settlement ex- 



LOW TIDES 213 

periments that include children, all the wonderful 
work of the Barnardo Homes, all legislation of 
whatever kind that has for the end in view 
the giving to childhood its opportunity, are 
manifestations of this tendency. It gives one 
courage ; for behind any marked world-wide 
tendency there is a living truth as motive power. 
Whenever a home is provided for a child, 
there we find this tendency working along lines 
that need be subject to no deviation, no ex- 
perimentation, no fluctuation of basis. The 
child, in such case, has come into his own. 

4- 

I must have been about eight years old when 
I went with my father and mother — they not 
caring to leave me at home that evening with 
a new maid — to a large hall where were gathered 
many hundreds of the best citizens, men and 
women of the city, to hear something of child- 
life in the slums of New York and its contribu- 
tion to humanity. 

I remember nothing of what was said by the 
various speakers on the platform. I was ab- 



214 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

sorbed, alive, and wide awake, although it 
was long past bedtime, in watching the one, 
to me, existing fact in that hall : the little 
children, boys and girls, ranged on a low bench 
behind the speakers. 

Just what these children were, who they were, 
whence they came, whither they were bound, 
occupied all my thoughts. My father whispered 
to me, when I questioned him, that they were 
orphans. As a matter of fact they were waifs 
of the slums, children without parents, without 
homes and knowing nothing of either, rescued 
from their surroundings and awaiting — what ? 

At the close of the addresses, during which I 
was kept wide awake watching the children 
two or three of whom were sleepy, my young 
eyes saw a marvellous sight ; I know now that it 
was the kingdom of heaven a-making on this 
earth. The gentleman who had the children 
in charge came forward to the front of the 
platform and holding up a little girl in his arms, 
in a silence I shall always, paradoxically, hear, 
asked if there were any in that audience who 
would take that child for their own. 



LOW TIDES 2is 

In that silence which impressed me, which I 
can hear now, I looked up into my father's 
face and saw the tears rolling down his cheek. 
I heard a sob from some one behind us ; then 
a man and woman rose and came down the 
main aisle, the man with arms outstretched. 
He took that child to be his and hers hence- 
forth. 

- Again and again in that profound silence 
this little scene in the great Life-Drama was 
enacted before my eyes, until all those children 
were provided with what alone could nourish 
their starved affections — a home. 

Remembering this, it happens now that when 
I know of a man and woman who, childless, 
take unto themselves as their own one such waif, 
realizing the effort, the labor, the watchful care 
necessitated for body and soul, the many sacri- 
fices of time and inclination, sometimes of per- 
sonal comfort entailed, a high tide of faith and 
hope floods heart and soul because I realize 
I am witnessing now, as years ago, something 
of the kingdom of heaven a-making on this 
earth. 



216 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

5. 

But when I see the flotsam of humanity left 
stranded, broken, fainting, despairing on the 
bared flats of life, I feel in my heart the ebb of 
hope, joy, enthusiasm — sometimes even of 
faith. 

I was once in the presence of seven hundred 
criminals in the State Prison at Charlestown — 
bolted in with them and their custodians in the 
assembly hall for an hour of "Thanksgiving" 
services. Perhaps I need not add that to me 
that hour seemed a travesty on "thanksgiving" 
of any kind. 

The purlieus of Edinburgh and Leith are not 
unknown to me — worse than what White- 
chapel used to be, so a Londoner who knew both 
assured me. I went out in search of the histori- 
cal-picturesque, and found — the Unbelievable. 

On our second visit to Edinburgh we took 
lodgings. Our landlady was a widow. A few 
weeks before our arrival she had lost through 
burglary a fine old watch which was her hus- 
band's. It had been traced to a pawnbroker's 



LOW TIDES 217 

shop in Leith. She asked me if I would like to 
go with her to see that seaport. She was a 
most interesting woman and worked among the 
wretched and outcast in the closes and wynds 
of the Cowgate and High Street. I knew I 
should have a pleasant and instructive hour or 
two in her company, and was glad to accept 
the invitation. I was young, about twenty- 
three, and the tide of joy and hope and enthu- 
siasm was at its height. 

I remember we found ourselves in Leith Walk 
— a seaport slum. She led the way into a 
narrow close; from there into a dark, small 
wynd into which it seemed the sun could 
never penetrate except in mid-summer. We 
climbed a dark, narrow, winding, stone stair 
to a small pawnshop; the dimensions must 
have been something like six feet by eight ex- 
clusive of the counter. I have seen the Ghetto 
in Frankfurt and its accumulations of ap- 
parent generations of dirt, refuse, and cast- 
off clothing; but that was cleanly, fresh-aired 
in comparison with this stifling den. 

As I stood by the counter waiting for my land- 



218 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

lady to redeem the watch, a woman came in 
from the stairway and stood beside me. I 
suppose it was a woman. She had on a soiled 
chemise and a ragged skirt and about her naked 
shoulders an old shawl. Dissipation of all kinds 
had rendered her features almost unrecognizable 
as a woman's — coarsened, inflamed, discolored 
them. She might have been thirty-five. Then 
and there, as she stood close beside me, she 
pawned to an attendant, who made his appear- 
ance from behind an old faded curtain strung 
behind the counter, the chemise from off her 
back — and for a mere pittance. 

The horror of that transaction, opening my 
eyes to bottomless depths of degradation of 
the human, produced for a time an ebb tide of 
all hope and faith. 

But now I know that that which stood beside 
me that August morning in the stifling pawnshop 
in the Leith wynd was but the broken machine, 
a wreck of the human that should be the ex- 
pression of the divine. I have come into the 
knowledge that the soul of that woman was some- 
thing apart from that wretched body — that 



LOW TIDES 219 

in touching her, as I stood beside her at that 
counter, I no more touched her soul than the 
utter abandonment of that body to debauch 
had touched it. This faith sustains me now. 
I have had many such unexpected object 
lessons, and I have learned them all the more 
thoroughly because I have been unprepared 
for what I was to learn. There was never a 
preparatory " slumming" in my life as an ave- 
nue of approach to any work of philanthropy. 
I have come upon facts that showed themselves 
to me stark naked — with not so much as a 
wisp of philanthropy, of sociology, of civic 
work, to hide their nakedness in my conception 
of them. 

6. 

In Chicago during the winter of 1 893-1 894, 
I saw hundreds of men lined up in deep snow and 
biting wind each waiting his turn for the work 
that should keep him and his alive. 

From personal knowledge I know what a 
great work was accomplished that winter in 
just keeping human beings from freezing, from 
starvation. Through a Captain of the Salva- 



220 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

tion Army I kept in touch with a corner of 
"Hell's Acre". Those who knew Chicago at 
that time will recognize the place as a portion 
of Polk Street. In a small room in that vicinity- 
men, irrespective of criminal record, were fed — 
seventeen of them at a time — but, alas, not 
often enough ! 

In that same winter, an acquaintance and I 
were coming homewards down the Lake Shore 
Drive from a reception at a mansion facing the 
lake. It was about six. The heavy wind was off 
shore and the ice-floes in the lake advanced grind- 
ing against the sea-wall only to recede after each 
advance a little farther from it. The snow was 
drifted two feet deep against the coping. 

Apparently we were the only ones on the 
Drive. We were hurrying on, our faces pressed 
into our muffs on account of the biting wind, 
when suddenly there came from over that 
waste of ice-floe and water a faint, strange cry. 
We stopped ; listened. That same cry was 
repeated, but louder, nearer: "Help — help!" 
That in its hoarseness it was scarcely humanly 
articulate need not be emphasized. 



LOW TIDES 221 

We ran across to the coping; leaned to look 
out on the heaving waters held down by the 
ice-floes. We could see the head of a man in 
the lake perhaps thirty feet from the coping. 
His hands were clinging to a small floe. 

'"I'll run back to the house for help," said 
my companion. I remained to try to "keep up 
his courage". 

Easily said, but with what ? I tried my 
puny strength on one of the park seats ; it 
was riveted. There was nothing in sight of 
any avail. I bethought me of the long trailing 
skirt of my reception gown. It was off and 
over the coping before the thought had wholly 
formulated itself. In that eighteen feet depth 
of coping and wall every stone was laid so 
perfectly that on all that surface not a crack 
was left wherein a man might insert his finger 
nails. That thought sickened me. In that 
intensified moment of living I saw every 
detail connected with the surroundings. There 
was nothing ponderable by which I might en- 
courage. 

In the powerful rays of the nearby arc-light, 



222 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

I knew the long trailing skirt could be seen by 
that man. "Hold on," I cried, "hold on, 
help is coming." Whether it would get there in 
time to save I could not know, but still I cried, 
"Hold on!" 

How many times I encouraged against all 
hope I do not know, for in a moment, some 
men — thirteen of them — came running with 
rope and stepladder from the laundry ; they were 
bareheaded, in their dress suits — straight from 
the reception, to which my companion had 
gone for help, to the rescue. 

It was quick, hard work — a rope, the step- 
ladder at the end, and both lowered over the 
coping with a man on the lower step and another 
on the upper, a crunch of ice — a hand over 
hand — a pulling all together and the man, be- 
numbed, exhausted, half frozen," was saved. 

He was a carpenter; a Swede. Want of 
work ; a three months' fruitless search ; three 
mouths to feed and nothing with which to feed 
them; then despair — and the lake. 

That he was deserting he knew when he flung 
himself over the coping, and he cried out in 



LOW TIDES 223 

hope to be saved and make good, somehow, 
to the children he had left. He was given work. 

Since then, when men and women, sitting in 
their comfortable homes, evolve sporadic econom- 
ical theories and attempt to promulgate them, 
when the periodical philanthropic frenzies are 
in evidence — they seem to me so empty, so 
ineffective over against the living fact : — 

The man wanted work ; was willing to work ; 
anxious for work — and he could obtain 
none. 

Our present system of economics finds itself 
in an impasse when confronted with this fact. 
When I think of this I experience a dead low 
politico-economic tide. 

I have wished many times that the contrast 
that night had not been quite so great, so sharp, 
that it had not been bitten into my memory as 
with an acid. For since then, it has happened 
that at a reception, in the midst of the glitter, 
the gayety, the frothy nothings, the frou-frou 
of rich robes, the empty laughter, the passing 
complaisance of men and women, I have heard 
an echo of that night and, hearing it, I have 



224 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

gone out quietly and very early — and no one 
has been the wiser for my going. 

7- 

I read recently Alfred Noyes' "The Wine- 
press" — an epic of War, the monster, a cross 
of the eight-armed octopus of Greed and hydra- 
headed Lust, enlived and engorged by human 
blood. 

The world shrank and shrivelled as I read. 
It seemed but a day's journey to that battle- 
field, for a monster arm of that war-octopus 
had extended, relentlessly indrawing, across 
a continent, across an ocean, and grasped a 
human life on this peaceful island four thousand 
miles distant. 

There is a small fruit shop on the main street 
kept by Greeks. I have traded there and al- 
ways with the one I called the "little Greek". 
It fed a certain vein of historical romance in 
me to buy my figs, dates, and various fruits 
from one who had trodden that soil which has 
yielded such rich satisfaction of enjoyment to 
mankind for the past twenty-five hundred years, 



LOW TIDES 225 

from Homer and Sophocles, Phidias and Praxit- 
eles to the small Corinthian grapes with which, 
as currants, to this day I may enrich my pound 
cake. 

The "little Greek" was requisitioned; he 
went home to fight as commanded. After the 
first war there was news of him and the expecta- 
tion of an early return to his island home. 
With the second war of the former allies there 
was silence. . . . 

There is still silence. 

Now there is ebb tide in my heart at the 
thought, and Alfred Noyes' "Winepress" is 
very real to me ; for I hear some of its drippings 
when I enter the fruit shop and no longer find 
the "little Greek" of whom I may purchase 
the baskets of grapes exposed for sale. 

8. 
Fortunately my low tides are not regulated 
wholly by any system of political economy. I 
have various lesser tides that are disheartening 
at times. The high cost of living, for instance. 
I went out a year ago last autumn with one 



226 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

dollar in my purse. I bought with those 
hundred cents one pound of butter, one dozen 
eggs, and two apples. This year for the same 
sum I should be minus the apples ! 

Then there is a real neap tide when I look at 
women in their present dress. It is fortunate 
for us all, I suppose, that we never can see 
ourselves with our own eyes. Why do women 
wish to make themselves look positively ugly ? 
In the pictures of another generation when 
hoops prevailed, there is to be seen an orderly 
doing up of the hair at least ; a decent appre- 
ciation of the fact that a woman has a waist in 
a good location, and a pretty foot well shod at a 
proper distance beneath those voluminous petti- 
coats. But now ! 

9- 

I was thinking the other day how truly con- 
sistent we are as a nation in this matter of 
dress. I had taken out a coin — rare with me — 
a twenty-dollar gold piece, and was examining 
the die after a design of Saint-Gaudens. 

"And is this my country's symbol ?" I said 
to myself : " is this menad with all the appear- 



LOW TIDES 227 

ance of split, diaphanous skirt, high waist, 
floppy blouse effect and wild streaming hair 
the symbol of ' liberty* and seal of approval 
to our present female apparel ? " For, in truth, 
we seem to copy this costume and woman of 
Saint-Gaudens designing very closely — alack ! 

Compare this with the "Wingless Victory " of 
the Greeks. Compare it with an exquisite 
head of Demeter, a plaster cast of which I 
possess ; it was made from one of the few mar- 
vellous cuttings of gems — in intaglio — in the 
Berlin Museum. Why can we not have as fine 
for our own mintage ? 

Taking out another coin, I made a close 
examination of that; it induced one of my 
periodical low art-tides. 

It is a ten-dollar gold piece recently minted. 
I find on it the Indian's head with war bonnet. 
Across the band of the bonnet over the forehead 
is the word "Liberty" in relief. 

Liberty ? How much liberty have the Indians 
as a race received from us as a nation ? How 
much liberty have they had to pursue their 
own ways of life since the coming of the white 



228 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

man ? Is it liberty to be moved, at the will of 
a Power, from South to North, from North to 
South, from East to West ? 

I have come late to the reading of a most 
remarkable work : "The Indians' Book", by 
Miss Curtis. It is both an historical docu- 
ment and a racial monument. It is in truth 
the Indians' book — their Bible. In it we 
may read in their own words the story of their 
wanderings, — we need not look to Egypt for 
an exodus, — their endurance, their attitude 
over against their conquerors, their hopes, their 
songs, — the expression of their ideals, — their 
conception of the fructifying forces of life and 
their intense religious life. It is truly the 
Indians' "scriptures". I even find in their 
self-colored drawings the ancient "blue and 
purple and scarlet" of the dwellers in another 
wilderness. 

Read this wonderful book, and when next 
you look at a gold "eagle", that comes into your 
hands fresh from the mint, draw your own con- 
clusions in regard to our want of a national 
sense of proportion in art ! Liberty ? The 



LOW TIDES 229 

Indian has not known it for nearly three 
centuries. 

No, liberty is not symbolized by our placing 
the word on an Indian's war bonnet. Neither 
is liberty the license of the menad. It is the 
restraint of controlled intelligence; and when 
we get controlled intelligence working in clay, 
marble, bronze, in painting and literature, we 
get true art. Art to be art must have a basis of 
truth ; it cannot be founded on a mockery of 
truth. If it be attempted, the result may be 
artistry, but never art. 

It would seem a thing of slight importance 
— this of the symbols on our national coinage ; 
but looked at closely it subjects us to criticism. 
The Bastile on a coin of the French Republic 
would be as appropriate for a symbol of liberty, 
as the designs on our present gold mintage. 

10. 

I look at Rodin's "The Thinker", and ask 
myself: "Is this the plastic expression of my 
generation ? " At Whistler's charming color- 
schemes and ask again : "Is this an expression 



230 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

in painting of certain tendencies of my genera- 
tion ? Where in both are evidences of the deep 
sea soundings ? " 

This remembrance of Rodin calls to mind 
Mr. Shaw whose bust he has made ; and Mr. 
Shaw reminds me of Galsworthy, and Gals- 
worthy of Wells, and Wells of Bennett — and 
all combined bring to remembrance the Henry 
James of the later period, Nietzsche, d'Annun- 
zio, Strindberg, Post-Impressionist, Symbolist, 
Futurist, Cubist — 

Dear me ! I find I am getting very low in my 
mind. It is really dead low tide ; the ebb has laid 
bare the rips and flats. But just this, contrary 
to what one might expect, gives me a feeling of 
buoyancy — for I know it will soon turn ! 



XVI 



HIGH TIDES 



I. 

It is high tide as I look from the window by 
which I am writing. The flats are covered ; 
storm clouds are drifting over the harbor; the 
air is soft ; the wind is from the southwest. 
Cows are grazing in a marshy meadow below 
the bank. Some ducks are quacking with a 
truly Hans Andersen liveliness. Now and then 
I hear the scream of a gull — inland, I think, 
for these scavengers prefer a half tide. 

I feel something of a scavenger myself after 
rescuing the flotsam of all those low tides of 
memories. 

2. 

With a thankful heart I dare assert that, 
temperamentally, I am built on what may be 
called high tide lines. This is no boast of an 
egoist, nor can it be a matter of personal vain- 
glory. It is a matter of inheritance ; I was born 

231 



232 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

so, and in the making of myself I was mot a 
factor. 

I like all that is fresh, wholesome, clean, 
whether of mind or matter. I adore courage 
whether moral or physical. I love honesty of 
purpose, purse, and word. I hate meanness ; 
despise cowardness ; loathe underhandedness 
— which statement is by no means to be inter- 
preted that I have not been guilty of petty 
meannesses, that I am not cowardly, at times, 
in the cause of truth. 

3- 

People say : "It is a dull day." 

Now it never occurs to me that a day in which 
I can breathe, eat, work, enjoy, — and there is 
always something to enjoy if only the gray, 
drifting slant of rain past the windows (the 
Japanese make so much of that in their art) — 
is "dull". This is a matter of temperament on 
which has been engrafted a habit of finding 
pleasure in little things. 

I find exactly as much to enjoy in the great 
market in Washington, for instance, as in the 



HIGH TIDES 233 

best theatre in New York. David Warfield's 
"Music Master" gives me pure delight of a 
certain kind. Some street-sweepers I was 
watching one day in Hanover, Germany, sud- 
denly dropping their brooms and dancing to 
the merry tune of a passing itinerant musician 
gave me just as much of another kind. 

A luncheon in the Senate lunch-room at the 
Capitol was a delightful experience because I 
broke bread with both "stand-patters" and 
progressives and there was good masculine talk, 
well worth attention, on interesting, national 
subjects. None the less interesting and enter- 
taining was a luncheon miraculously provided 
for an acquaintance and myself in a far away 
forsaken village in our North Country, on the 
border line between New Hampshire and Ver- 
mont. 

4- 

I shall never forget that day ! We found our- 
selves stranded, so far as train connections 
were concerned, for six hours in as forsaken and 
depressing a place as ever has come within my 
travelling experience. 



234 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

For once, I confess, things looked indeed 
"dull". It was an intensely hot, humid Sep- 
tember day. The clouds were low, threatening 
rain and blanketing an already over-heated 
earth. It was a task to draw a full breath. 

To be sure there was the station, but it was 
no refuge — dark, hot, uncleanly, it was filled 
with flies that "sensing" rain foregathered by 
thousands in the waiting-room. There was 
nothing up the street but tracks, dust, and a 
building called a "town hall" on which was the 
advertisement of a "show". These are the two 
hall marks of a North Country village. 

Down the street there was a vulgarly new, 
staring, red brick block, and farther along on 
the other side among grass and weeds was a 
lunch-wagon. Once it must have been white; 
now it was the acme of dingy, muddy, grimy, 
streaked forlornity. It was labelled in huge 
letters : White House Cafe ! 

And seeing that we smiled for the first time 
since our arrival and walked on an eighth of a 
mile to a toll bridge. I felt positively mediaeval 
when I paid one cent to cross it and another to 



HIGH TIDES 235 

return from a vista of long, forsaken road, 
and a few trees and bushes powdered ash color 
with dust. It is needless to say that we did not 
patronize the "White House Cafe". We were 
hungry, tired, and a bit depressed when we 
returned to the station and asked the ticket 
agent if there were a place where we could 
get something to eat ; both of us were too 
cowardly to say "luncheon" in that special 
environment. 

"To be sure," he said right cheerily; "just 
across the road in that block is a cellar. They 
opened a restaurant there a few days ago." 

"Is it good ?" I asked. 

"Can't be beat in the state of New Hamp- 
shire," he affirmed with such conviction that we 
smiled for the second time; "but", he added, 
"'t'ain't open till noon." 

We thanked him and went out on the railed 
platform for air. As we leaned on the railing, 
wondering just at that moment what life was 
really for, we heard the sudden blare of trumpet 
and beat of drum, and down the street from 
the town hall came a fine-looking band of men 



236 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

gorgeous in corded sombrero, sheepskin "chaps", 
red and yellow neckerchiefs — the Texas Rang- 
ers. 

£* They made a brave show ! Our spirits rose. 
Halting in front of the station platform they 
played one popular tune after the other, fortis- 
simo, agitando, accelerando furioso, — French 
horns, trombone, clarinet, and drum, — until 
we thought some vein must burst. Their 
cheeks were blown poppy red, their hands red, 
their eyes fixed and protruding. Never, never 
was musical notation written for such a pace ! 
Never had such inspiriting music filled my ears 
and my soul with such peculiar joy ! Strauss 
and his "Till Eulenspiegel " are mere by-prod- 
ucts, in comparison, for noise and hearty 
resonance. 

How we enjoyed it ! How we applauded ! 
How we regretted that we could not stay over 
for the "show" ! How the few children shouted 
with delight and the one old horse attached to a 
lone farmer's wagon on the outside of the ring 
cavorted and snorted to the tune of the "Wash- 
ington March " ! 



HIGH TIDES 237 

Marine Band ? Senate lunch-room and five 
senatorial courses ? They never yielded quite 
the enjoyment of those Texas Rangers, and here 
is my public acknowledgment for the pleasure 
they gave me. 

At twelve, promptly, we went down the eight 
steep steps into the "cellar" — and what did we 
find ? A full-fledged Rathskeller among the 
hills of our North Country ! It was clean, 
freshly painted in white and pale olive green. 
A white shelf around the entire room was filled 
with cheap steins of every species, stuffed 
squirrels, mugs of bright flowers. On the painted 
walls were some fairly good pictures — one of 
Venice and the Piazzetta ! In addition there 
were clean tables, clean lunch-counter, clean 
dishes, a clean, smiling waitress — pretty too. 
I found on the "dinner-card" egg-sandwiches. 

"The last touch of a perfected civilization," 
I said to myself as I ordered two, the other pro- 
vision of hot pork and "fixings" not being to 
my taste in that temperature. 

When they came I found to my amazement 
that the hill-country Rathskeller idea of an egg- 



238 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

sandwich was an egg fried hard in pork fat 
and placed hot between two huge slices of but- 
tered bread ! 

The last aesthetic touch to our pleasant sur- 
roundings was given by the entrance of the 
Texas Rangers who, divested of all their para- 
phernalia, in becoming street dress, brown from 
exposure to sun and wind, healthy with fresh 
air, dark eyed, dark haired, and well mannered, 
filled the three remaining vacant tables in this 
foreign graft of a Rathskeller. 

This experience is one of my high tides on the 
border of a state that has no coast line. 

5- 

And then there are such spring tides of ap- 
preciative recognition ! All of us must at some 
time experience them : recognition of what is 
best in painting, sculpture, literature, and, in 
consequence, rejoicing that some of the most 
wonderful thought of this great, perplexing 
humanity of ours may find its ablest interpreta- 
tion through genius. 

Going over in my mind the other day the 



HIGH TIDES 239 

examples of plastic art that have most influenced 
me, I was surprised to find how few they are. 
Our own country has two masterpieces through 
one of its sons, born an alien, and both belong to 
the world that genius enriches. 

6. 

Time and again when I was living in Chicago, 
I walked to the entrance of Lincoln Park and 
stood before that marvellous statue of Abraham 
Lincoln — so strong, tender, hopeful, brave. 
There is a prayer on those firm lips. He is 
looking toward the South and in his eyes there 
is the keen appreciation of the seer who reads 
the years and bids mankind further dare and do ! 

Surely Saint-Gaudens fixed here in bronze 
for the enlightenment of future generations the 
meaning of "The hour — the man", as no one 
else has ever done. 

Perhaps his Adams statue in Rock Creek 
Cemetery, in Washington, may be said to be 
one of the very few masterpieces in sculpture 
that the world has produced for the last three 
hundred years. It belongs to the world, for it 



240 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

embodies the deepest emotion, and the greatest 
unanswered thought of the human race : the 
grief of loss over against the want of the absolute 
assurance of immortality. 

On a wonderful April day a few years ago, 
I entered the natural, arbor-like enclosure 
formed by magnolias and one ancient, over- 
shadowing, southern pine, and sitting down 
opposite this statue lived with it for half an hour. 

The natural setting is perfect. A quiet 
prevailed that reminded me of Saint John's 
expression: "There was silence in heaven for 
about the space of half an hour." The sun- 
light falling through the interstices of the foliage 
brought out the exquisite ivory disks of the 
magnolia blooms and played about the head 
of the statue. The breeze stirring the branches 
of the pine shifted the shadows in its mantle. 

The Form sits alone with Grief. It is mantled 
from head to foot with despair; the shoul- 
ders are slack, sorrow-weighted. Beneath the 
swollen, drooping lids the tears have furrowed 
deep their dry-run courses. The lips are com- 
pressed, for theirs is silent speech. 



HIGH TIDES 241 

There has been nothing like this since Michael 
Angelo. 

7- 

In the Duomo of Florence there is an absence 
of ornamentation which is refreshing to eyes 
that throughout Italy and France have been 
accustomed to overelaboration of detail. I 
used to go in there frequently of a morning when 
on my way to the Mercato Vecchio which I 
fairly haunted during the winter we lived in the 
city of Saint Mary of the Flowers. 

As one enters from the brilliant sunshine, 
the eye has to accustom itself to the darkness ; 
then follows the relief of the wide-spaced, unen- 
cumbered nave. Walking farther on towards 
the apse one comes suddenly — or did then, I 
do not know if it be there now — on a marvel- 
lous group, an unfinished Pieta by Michael 
Angelo — and, seeing that, one sees little else 
in the cathedral even if one visit it frequently. 

The mother leans over her son who lies 
partly across her knees. In that face we see 
the soul of a mother in anguish. The anguish 
is human, the Son is human, the mother is 



242 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

human — and the work makes its appeal to 
humans. 

To this group I owe much enlightenment 
as to the "soul of mothers". 

8. 

There are two other mothers in art with whom 
I associate this unfinished work of Michael 
Angelo's ; we bridge three centuries to find them. 

One may be seen in that group by Constantin 
Meunier, "Le Grisou" (Firedamp), in Brussels. 
Here, also, the mother is leaning above her son, 
the dead miner. It is a plastic expression of the 
almost daily tragedy that goes on "under the 
crust" in this age of a monster Industrialism. 

Looking into that mother's face I feel her 
grief to be a factor of the elemental human. 
So have other mothers looked since maternity 
knew itself for motherhood — felt, sorrowed 
over the man child born to a short toiling struggle 
and early death. She is the plastic embodiment 
of motherhood bereft of hope of immortality 
through offspring. "She expresses all the com- 
passion of one who has borne and suffered, and 



HIGH TIDES 243 

who watches, with no word left, the wrecking 
of a life and the nothingness of hope and youth." 

Here also I find a certain speech of silence to 
be interpreted by a future generation. 

The other is a myth-mother. In the Athe- 
naeum in Helsingfors hangs a painting by Axel 
Gallen — " Lemminkainen's Mother " — from 
the Finnish epic of the Kalevala. 

I have seen only the photographic reproduc- 
tion ; even in that its emotional appeal is almost 
overpowering. She, too, sits beside the dead 
body of her son, resting a hand on the lifeless 
form. Her face is raised in anguished protest 
against such intensity of suffering, yet it is 
patient with the knowledge that she must bear 
the Inevitable. That face is old, lined, worn, 
the corners of the mouth are drooping and 
slightly drawn. The appeal in those old, dry 
eyes is more heart-rending than the reddened, 
tear-swollen lids of youth, for her heart knows 
the flinty ways of life and her sad eyes may not 
blink the glaring fact that death pays no heed to 
the order of primogeniture. 

These two sculptured forms and faces, and 



244 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

the one painting by Axel Gallen, permit us to see 
deeply into the mother-soul when the light of 
that soul is eclipsed by the death of what is 
very bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh and, 
ofttimes, spirit of her spirit. I have felt the in- 
fluence of all three. 

9- 

There must be a drop of pagan blood in my 
veins for, apart from these four great sculp- 
tures that have influenced and continue to 
influence me, I am most indebted for an under- 
standing of how plastic art may interpret life 
to the wonderful sculptures from the altar of 
Pergamos. They are in Berlin. 

Through them I understand something of 
the beginning of things on this earth : the 
titanic warring of ideals and elemental earth 
forces. These great forms, — sometimes the 
relief is ten inches in depth, — embody in my 
thought of them the present struggle of men, 
the half-gods, for the mastery of natural 
forces ; for the conquering of the air, the sea, the 
earth, the deadly bacillus — their attempt to 
overcome even death. 



HIGH TIDES 245 

One of Rodin's nudes beside any one of these 
living, struggling, wrestling, sculptured forms 
would show the inadequacy of his attempt to 
voice our generation. His "Thinker", for in- 
stance, placed beside a warring Titan would 
show merely as a poseur; whereas Meunier's 
"Puddler" belongs in their midst, is one of 
them ; is something of each faction — god and 
earth-born — as are the men who "overcome" 
in mine or quarry, in the earth, on the sea, in 
the air. 

What Rodin desires to express in the 
"Thinker" is, doubtless, the awakening of 
thought in Mankind concerning the why and 
wherefore of existence on this earth that must 
be tilled and worked by man to produce him and 
sustain him. But the "Puddler" of Meunier 
thinks as he pants heavily with open mouth, 
resting from the horrible strain of his toil. 
Rodin's man seems to say, "I am, therefore I 
think"; Meunier's, "I work, therein I show 
myself a thinking man." In the latter's 
masterpieces we may test the worth of the Age 
of Industrialism. 



246 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

IO. 
And what high tides of rejoicing in heart and 
mind and soul when I enumerate all the good 
that has been bestowed on the millions of our 
race, including my own small millionth, through 
John Bunyan, Israels, Hauptmann, Lessing, 
Goethe, Shakespeare, Carlyle, and Ruskin, 
Burne- Jones, Meunier, Balzac, Dickens, — yes, 
and Rudyard Kipling and Finley Peter Dunne 
(our inimitable philosopher, Mr. Dooley) and 
Phillips Brooks and Jane Addams and Dr. 
Barnardo and the men of science — but I need 
another book to enumerate all of those who have 
blessed, are blessing, and will continue to bless 
us and future generations. The good works 
" through all, in all, onward through all ". 

ii. 

But there are two flood tides which, thank 
God, never ebb : the tide of love and the tide of 
friendship. I mean true love and true friend- 
ship. They cannot ebb by their very nature, 
for they are of the essence of divinity and the 
primal source is always filling to the divine level. 



HIGH TIDES 247 

If we may count our true friends on the two 
fingers of our right hand — yes, on one — we 
may dare to say we have known God. If once 
during a lifetime, whether long or short, we 
may assert that we have known the meaning 
of true love, we may consider ourselves of the 
Immortals. 

12. 

January 26, 1914. 

It is sunset as I write. The tide is on the 
flood. Across the deep-blue harbor waters, 
roughened in the wind, the shores and moors 
of Monomoy, Shimmo, Pocamo curve to 
Wauwinet and the "haulover" — a crescent of 
amethyst. I have seen this light at sunset on 
the hills of Fiesole near Florence, but in no 
other place until I found it here. The sky 
above is pale rose ; a line of clear, blue-green 
separates it from the amethystine moors. In 
the foreground the little creeks in the marshy 
brown meadow gleam faintly blue. A reach of 
quiet water in the lee of the old wharf is touched 
with deep rose. 

The shadows are falling on the black roofs, 



248 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

the great, gray chimneys, the weather-worn 
fishermen's huts on the shore. The rose above 
is deepening, the blue beneath darkening. The 
waters are alive and the wind is freshening. 

I like this high tide ; but I am thankful just 
for to-night that the dusk is falling and I may 
not see its ebb. 



XVII 



SEARCHLIGHTS 



I. 

My grandmother used to say : " I was born a 
hundred years too soon." 

That was her one great regret, so eager was 
her desire to know more of her country's mar- 
vellous development, and the progress in inven- 
tion that had its inception in her day. I wonder 
if the regret would be so keen if she were living 
in this century ? I doubt it ; yet, at times, I 
find myself wishing I might be permitted to 
turn a powerful twentieth century searchlight 
on the conditions of our race a hundred years 
from now. I should like to be able to "pick 
up" at least the buoys. 

2. 
Here in our own waters the searchlight is 
used for excessively dark nights and in fog. 

249 



250 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

At times the fog is so thick ! Impenetrable 
to sight, baffling as to course, confusing as to 
sound, disheartening to all — and the search- 
light is practically useless. 

3- 

The Age has not been quite fair with my 
generation ; we have been experimented with 
and upon like no other since recorded history. 
That we have stood the pressure as we have 
makes for faith in our vitality as a race and 
warrants the assumption that spiritually we 
are "something more than we seem". The 
experiments are of such a varied nature and 
along so many lines ! They have come so thick 
and fast, like a sudden fog settling upon sea 
and land and blotting out direction, beacons, 
signposts, refuge, at one and the same time. 
One becomes confused, dazed in such an environ- 
ment where sight and hearing are indeterminate. 

I permit myself to use the first person, for 
personal experience is apt to be more convincing 
and interesting than the statistical experi- 
mentation of a generation. 



SEARCHLIGHTS 251 

I have been classed with rabbits, guinea pigs, 
and monkeys. They have been experimented 
on for my sake that every deadly bacillus might 
be examined, every germ defined, every serum 
produced that can be marshalled to fight death 
on the one hand by producing germicide on the 
other. I am labelled scientifically like a tube 
of culture germs. I am classed with peas and 
beans and am subject to the Mendelian laws 
of heredity because they are subject to that law. 
I am said to be a descendant of simian ancestry 
because Darwin has lived to use that wonderful 
brain for the benefit and enlightenment of the 
race. 

No longer may I have any Bible, as I have 
always understood that word, because that 
book has been criticized, re-written, put under 
the exhaust air-pump glass of science, and 
declared to be a delusion and a snare. I may 
have no God because certain men, measuring 
the universe with their tape-measure of wisdom 
and investigation, decide that I have worshipped 
merely an ideal. Mr. William James tried to 
substitute "pragmatism" and failed. He led 



252 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

men and women to the crossroads and said, 
"This way", — but could not say "to what". 
Love is a matter of electricity; life enlived 
matter. The bounds of the universe are known. 
Haeckel conjugates matter throughout the entire 
universe and nothing but matter : I am matter, 
thou art matter, he, she, or it is matter. To 
conjugate otherwise is another delusion and 
snare. 

Submarines make acquaintance with the fast- 
diminishing whale and like that mammal come 
up to the surface to breathe. Aeroplanes defy 
all known laws of aerostatics and prove that 
there is no other element to conquer. Machines 
are made so delicately adjusted that they can 
pick up a needle or remove a block of granite. 
The North and South Poles are labelled — 
United States and Norway ; soon we shall be 
able to whisper by wireless telephony from one 
to the other ; there is nothing left to discover. 

The result of all this sudden precipitation of 
ideas, inventions, discovery, is that my genera- 
tion and I have found ourselves, at times, in 
what an old lighthouse keeper I knew on an 



SEARCHLIGHTS 253 

island off the Maine coast used to say was "a 
teetotal dungeon fog ". 

4- 

There are three things you can do in a fog. 
If you are on a river and the laws of the land 
are practical, you will have to drop anchor till 
it lifts. This action saves both yourself and 
others. 

If you are on the high seas and there are no 
laws to command and guide you, either you can 
take the risk of going ahead at full steam to 
make a record run, or you can slow down, take 
soundings, and wait for it to lift. 

In the third place you can wander around, if 
you happen to be in London, see men, lamp- 
posts, cabs, and drays "as trees walking", or 
not at all ; and if you are so fortunate as to find 
the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square, you 
can sit down by the lions and wait, chilled and 
disheartened, until the fog disperses. 

All these methods of comporting oneself in a 
fog are mere attempts for the time at com- 
promise with life. Meanwhile, it is not a matter 



254 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

for wonderment that so many are bewildered, 
lost. 

5- 
There is one fact about fog, the densest, 
blackest, most bewildering, most baffling that 
can form : it always lifts ; certain natural laws 
preclude the possibility of its continuance. 

6. 

I see signs that the fog which has bewildered 
and baffled my generation and the present one, 
which has obscured the spiritual vision and 
confused the listening spirit of man, is lifting. 
I look forward confidently to the time when it 
shall be lifted wholly in order that men and 
women shall see clearly their surroundings ; 
that they shall think clearly with unbefogged 
brains ; that they shall work in hope, shall live 
in faith. 

Meanwhile — ah, meanwhile ! — so many are 
lost. 

7- 

There are various fogs that tend to obscure, 
to bewilder. We on this island, for instance, 



SEARCHLIGHTS 255 

may see from our windows the sudden precipi- 
tation of the snow fog that adds cold to the ele- 
ment of great danger. 

We have the thin, vaporous, layer-fog which, 
allowing the sight to penetrate a little way in 
various directions, shuts off all view of the sky. 
We know the sun is there above, shining ; 
but we may not see it, strain our eyes as we will ; 
nor at night can we see one star by which the 
mariner may steer. 

The so-called "black fog" is rarely seen on 
these waters ; but when it forms, earth and 
sea and sky are blotted out and the window 
panes are a blank. 

But they always lift. Meanwhile — alas ! 
— a schooner or bark is fast on rock or rip ; a 
steamer has grounded on the bar; a derelict 
has threatened a five-master with disaster, and 
bell buoys, sirens, fog horns, searchlights, and 
the lighthouse keeper's dinner bell are at work 
in vain. 

8. 

Perhaps no fog has been thicker and more 
bewildering to the men and women of my genera- 



256 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

tion than that which, in Whitman's words, may 
be said to be "the darkening and dazing with 
books". 

When a great amount of stock is suddenly 
and without warning unloaded upon the market, 
a panic is precipitated. When within a genera- 
tion a million ideas, accompanied by as many 
inventions and discoveries, are unloaded upon 
men and women who think, and see, and hear, 
taste, smell, and feel, — human sensitive-plates, 
all of them, — there is apt to be a world-wide 
panic of unreason, for reason itself is befogged. 
These ideas are precipitated so suddenly and 
in such masses along every known line of life, 
from every direction, that man as an entity 
stands for a time in their midst practically 
lost, bewildered, without guide or compass, or 
if he have a compass, it is of no use. Reason 
cannot effect a "way out" even if it will; 
objectively it has nothing upon which to work, 
for all objects are obscured or, at least, rendered 
disproportionate, distorted by refraction through 
the fog medium. 

No wonder so many suffer shipwreck, are 



SEARCHLIGHTS 257 

lost in swamp, perish in the abyss, give over 
life because their poor human eyes fail to find 
a "way out" 

9- 

This man promulgates his theory of the uni- 
verse ; another proves it to be useless. A 
third advances a new hypothesis and a fourth 
cuts the ground from under it by one small fact 
discovered through a powerful telescope. Some 
other man makes a more powerful lens and the 
fact is shown to be a fact only in so far as it 
may be related to and coordinated with future 
discoveries. These discoveries may shake as- 
tronomy to its foundation. And so on ad 
infinitum. All these ideas are printed, read — 
and the world is dazed. 

Man not content with the power of his own 
eye increases its magnifying and searching 
power by the use of the microscope. What 
used to be an atom is no longer such. Division 
can take place infinitely. Every lens more 
powerful than another reveals new facts. Every 
new fact, in relation to previous discovery, 
may modify every other known fact. Men 



258 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

search and search — and in the end make plain 
only that infinitude leads to infinitude. All 
these ideas are printed, read in a truncated 
fashion, discussed — and the world is be- 
wildered ; it cannot adjust itself in another 
medium. 

Science has shown to man himself — the 
mechanical part of him. We accept this fact 
stolidly for it does not alter the seasons, affect 
the harvests, or induce man to live on one meal 
a day. We are as we are ages before science as 
science was. 

In astronomy the result may be that we can 
calculate the possible dimensions of a sun spot, 
but we cannot avert disaster to the crops for all 
the calculations. In human life the individual 
soul brings to naught all collective results of 
calculation. 

Now we are being informed rather thoroughly 
as to our mental makeup. Psychology and 
psychiatry are busily at work to show us why 
we think as we do ; what we should think given 
certain environment, certain living conditions. 
Also, why, if we do not think as we should think 



SEARCHLIGHTS 259 

in given conditions, we should be induced to 
think as others think we ought to think ! All 
this is well in its place — as an experiment; but 
meanwhile we grope befogged by the multi- 
plicity of ideas and the hypnotic use of words, 
words, and ever words, until in the end we some- 
times think we do not think at all. 

That sane word of Goethe's is needed to clear 
up this fog : " I have never thought about 
thinking." 

10. 

And here is another word to the wise : " Scien- 
tists need not so much close investigation for 
the purpose of supplying facts and coordinating 
them, but the concentrated and prolonged 
thought on the principles underlying natural 
phenomena." 

11. 

I was standing at the window one evening 
last October, watching for the coming of the 
boat. It was eight o'clock. The night was 
black, for heavy thunder clouds obscured the 
sky. I was looking for the steamer's lights 
when, without warning, the searchlight focussed 



260 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

me. It was startling. I felt for that second 
as if every secret thought of mine was laid bare 
to the night, as well as every organ of my body. 
This is the kind of searchlight I should like to 
turn on the coming hundred years. 

But as I cannot do that, I trust I may be 
permitted to turn the searchlight of a question 
in three different directions in the hope, at 
least, of picking up the "buoys". 

Twenty years ago I visited Hull House. 
Fancy, then, the pleasure and profit I have had 
recently in reading Miss Addams's "Twenty 
Years at Hull House". This book, like the 
Memorials of Dr. Barnardo of London, is a 
sociological beacon as trusty as my Sankaty 
light "over eastward" across the moors. 

In the presence of such noble achievement 
we feel the lifting of the fog; we see the clear- 
ing of the social atmosphere. And because 
this work is so noble, so far reaching, so full of 
past accomplishment and future promise, I 
should like in all humility, but very earnestly, 
to put one question to its founder after her 
twenty years of such faithful work : 



SEARCHLIGHTS 261 

"Would you, had you opportunity to begin 
again those twenty years of your life work, which 
has proved the salvation of so many, and en- 
riched and enlightened as you are by this expe- 
rience with human kind during all those years, 
lay as the first foundation stone of this work 
— 'the head of the corner' — the actual teach- 
ing, not only by example, to men and women 
and children of these various nationalities the 
power of God, the Father, to sustain the spirit 
of man, and the power of salvation on this 
earth through the great truths of life as taught 
by Christ?" 

12. 

Truly, as Mr. Gilbert Murray says, there is 
such a thing as the "spiritual life-blood of a 
people". This "spiritual life-blood" must be 
nourished ; and music, literature, painting, sculp, 
ture, good comradeship, contact with finer 
minds, congenial work, help to nourish — but 
not satisfactorily. The spirit of man cries out 
for other food; for that which will give him 
spiritual strength to endure the hardest con- 
ditions ; for that which shall enrich his spirit 



262 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

to such an extent that to be "poor" is not, in 
the man's outlook on this life, the "great evil"; 
that will show him toil, labor, work as a blessing, 
not a curse. The spirit of man needs to be so 
sustained, so nourished that cold shall not be 
the cold of degree but of kind ("Blow, blow, 
thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as 
man's ingratitude.") ; that suffering of the body- 
shall be endurable in comparison with the 
suffering that comes from the consciousness 
of sin; that the hunger of the body cannot 
kill the hunger of the soul for God ; that death 
shall be not only the "way out", but the "way 
in". Into what? — We may not know; and 
life accepted on these terms is faith. 

13- 

These things are of the mysteries. Yet even 
as I write that word "mysteries", I recall what 
a man who deals daily with life and death said 
to me a year ago : "It is all so simple," — this 
power of God to sustain the spirit, and the 
meaning of Christ's life on earth. It is simple 
— to be comprehended by every human being 



SEARCHLIGHTS 263 

if only the channel can be opened by which 
man's spirit " may flow direct to God ". 

Swedenborg wrote thirty-eight — I think I 
am correct in this number — octavo volumes, 
many of them to interpret Christianity. Christ 
interpreted it in eight words : " I am come to show 
you the Father." 

H. 

This world is not so very old. At heart it 
is still aglow; and constantly, although we 
may be unconscious of it, it sends forth from 
its glowing heart an energy and life-force by 
which our bodies are helped to live. One and 
all in this world are dependent on it. 

Neither is this humanity of ours so very old 
— not yet. Its heart is aglow. But the crust 
is thickening. Feeding the spirit of man fans 
that heart-flame and sets free a life-force, the 
value of which can be hourly demonstrated. 
The spirit of man must have sustenance, must 
be fed, and not only fed but nourished, else the 
material facts of life in their complexity will 
overwhelm, overcome him. "Man shall not 
live by bread alone." 



264 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

IS- 

And once more letting the searchlight-beam 
travel slowly across the length and breadth of 
our country, I wish it might find and illumine 
the mind, heart, and soul of an Indian of the 
past generation, a Winnebago, for instance. 
I should like to know what he thinks of our 
vaunted "civilization" ? How he feels in re- 
gard to the many philanthropic experiments 
that have been tried upon him ? How his soul 
regards the Great Mystery in the face of his 
race's devolution ? 

I should like to know if he have kept his faith. 

Thereafter the beam, travelling slowly, should 
seek out this island and pick up my own soul 
as it picked up the buoys on that dark night in 
October. And looking into that mystery I should 
ask of myself : "How dare you question another 
soul when you may not know your own ?" 

16. 

I, like other humans, do not wish to be mis- 
understood. If I rebel against the fact that, 



SEARCHLIGHTS 265 

on account of the elements of which I am com- 
posed and the laws that are supposed to govern 
my creation, I am classed with peas, beans, 
rabbits, guinea pigs, and monkeys for the sake 
of experimentation, it is not for a moment to 
be interpreted that I do not see and acknowl- 
edge with reverence and thankfulness the great 
work of science; that I do not bow before the 
patience, the sacrifice, the toil that has given 
and gives such marvellous results so beneficial 
to mankind. But I rebel against the word of 
science being the final word for mankind. Nor 
am I alone in considering this attitude of finality 
"antiquated". 

Personally, I feel very near at times to the 
fish in the sea, the bird in the air, to the lowly 
grass and the flowers in which the dust of my 
material frame may appear again on this earth. 
When I see the petals of a flower prepare for 
the flower-sleep, when at sunset I see a raccoon 
curled about the branch of a tall tree like a 
chestnut burr on a twig, I, too, feel a certain 
natural kinship. I realize I am something of 
each. Nay, more, I have a feeling of pleasant 



266 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

relationship with an intelligent monkey, and 
never omit an opportunity to put a five-cent 
piece into the tiny — oh, so human ! — hand 
that is thrust at me from the top of the hurdy- 
gurdy. Indeed, I would pay far more just to 
see at close range the inquiring lift of those 
callouses that stand for eyebrows, and the roll 
of those beady eyes. I am not so sure that I 
feel wholly unrelated to an electric light as I 
stand by the post. I realize that I am one 
with the universal elements, not so far removed 
from their curious combinations and expressions 
that I dare say to anyone of them, "I am made 
of different material from you." 

But — when it comes to the fact of my own 
soul, my spirit draws the line. Into that 
spiritual fastness of mine no one has a right 
to penetrate forcibly, to deny its existence, 
or try to prove there is no such thing, or attempt 
to show that what I call "my soul" has been 
gradually evolved during aeons, as matter, from 
occult processes in the evolution of the amoeba. 

I may not know my own soul except dimly, 
in part, — how can I, it being of the essence 



SEARCHLIGHTS 267 

of the Creator whose "thoughts are as high 
above my poor thought as the heavens are 
above the earth" ? But I know I possess one; 
/ have that knowledge, — although no one else 
may have it, — and I know that it is the reason 
for my being on this earth ; that for me to deny 
it is to deny me as a fact. 

I know that I may not know but in part this 
soul of mine, but that what I know of it assures 
me that I may not enter into another's soul. 
It is that part of me as an individual that 
another may not touch. Even love may not 
fuse one soul with another soul ; and the non- 
knowledge of this has been and is productive of 
such misery among men and women ! 

I touch it, at times, tangentially only ; but at 
others I may enter a little way into that spirit- 
ual fastness and know something of its essence 
through intuitions that may not be denned or 
even catalogued. This soul of mine abides, in 
a way, apart. But it is mine, and to it I owe 
all that interprets this life, all that makes this 
life the great miracle, all that enables me to 
endure the thought of the saddened life of the 



268 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

world, all that convinces me we "know only in 
part"; all that makes me conscious of some 
kind — I care not what kind it may be — of 
immortality. 

A materialist knows nothing of this ; nothing 
either of the universal soul — or of mine. 

17- 
I love to recall that word of George Sand's ; 
I am glad to record it just here : "II n'y a de 
sur dans ce monde que ce qui se passe entre 
Dieu et nous." 



XVIII 

THE GULLS AND AVIATION 
I. 

On a Sunday morning, two years ago, I was 
on one of the large yachts anchored in the 
harbor. After luncheon I had the deck to my- 
self, barring the captain and two or three of the 
crew forward. 

A strong, southwest wind was blowing and 
threatened to increase. There were hundreds 
of gulls flying about over the harbor and in- 
dulging in some aeronautic gymnastics solely 
it seemed for their own pleasure. But that was 
not so, for I was an interested and delighted 
audience of one. 

Through a powerful glass I watched their 
movements for two hours. 

No aeroplane has yet ventured to cross the 
sound and a portion of the open sea from the 
mainland to this island. But that day will 

269 



270 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

come; this is written in the Domesday Book 
of Progress. If, for instance, a flight were 
made from the life-saving station at Monomoy 
on the Cape, with the powerful stationary 
glass on my back porch I could follow the entire 
course. 

Watching these gulls so closely gave rise to 
doubts, to questions as to the final stability 
and utility of the aeroplane or any invention 
by which men may seek in future to conquer the 
air. These living aeroplanes knew exactly 
what they were about. With heavy, powerful, 
labored downward stroke they would beat 
slowly up at an angle of thirty degrees against 
the strong wind — one mile, two miles, until 
they were high over the island. Then — well, 
I cannot say just what happened. They cer- 
tainly turned "on edge" when they tacked 
sharply and centripetally to come round before 
the wind ; but in so doing they apparently 
turned turtle, for the wind was very strong. 

I cannot prove this, not after those two hours 
of patient watching; but I failed to see how 
they could make so sharp a turn in the face 



THE GULLS AND AVIATION 271 

of that strong wind without a half-second of 
capsizing. Now that we know that aviators 
have flown head downwards, it may be possible 
that the gulls adjusted themselves in some such 
manner on that afternoon. The long, swift 
glide on full-spread wings to the level of the 
water was a thing to remember. 

Again and again they returned to their sport, 
beating up against the increasing wind, laboring 
heavily as I could plainly see, covering the up- 
ward course only to perform that "on edge" 
turn at the height of their flight over the island 
and glide down triumphantly on the aerial 
toboggan slide. 

It reminded me of that at once — toboggan- 
ing, and the long hard pull up the hill for 
the sake of the glorious minute of rapid de- 
scent. 

2. 

After watching the gulls for so long a time, 
it seemed to me that in the present make of 
aeroplanes, the rigidity of the planes, the angle 
of their jointure and the location of the centre 
of gravity must militate against all permanent 



272 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

stability in flight. But perhaps the Burgess- 
Dunne machine may solve this problem. 

Still, as I think it over, I cannot see how the 
air in movement is to be conquered ; for even 
the gulls feel the great winds and are driven 
helplessly before them against any object, like 
the lighthouse lantern, that is in their aerial 
path. Moreover, the most of them lie low some- 
where during a great gale. 

3- 
Captain Paul W. Beck writes : "In actual 
flight I have experienced side slips, lateral fore 
and aft disturbances in balance, right or left 
drifts and other actual movements that I have 
been utterly unable to explain by any theory 
that exists. This experience is not unique, 
however; upon reciting some of these expe- 
riences to 'pure' scientists, I have been met 
with looks that plainly indicated that I was 
either stating untruths or was an egregious idiot. 
They would prove mathematically and scien- 
tifically that which I already knew, viz., that 
my experience was impossible. Yet the ex- 
periences stand." 



THE GULLS AND AVIATION 273 

4- 

We experience something of this when, over 
against the "pure" scientist and materialist, 
we assert some intimations of immortality — 
what may be termed unaccountable, spiritual 
"side slips", "right and left drifts". They 
say they are "impossible experiences". 

Yet such experiences stand. 



XIX 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 



I. 

I have taken so many in my life. Sometimes, 
and the majority of times, they have yielded 
me nothing. Sometimes what has been brought 
up from the depths has not been worth examina- 
tion. Much has been strange, unaccountable, 
impossible to classify because unrecognizable 
for any known thing. Some findings have 
been familiar and as a result the depths have 
not seemed bottomless. At such times I feel 
that the lead has actually touched bottom. 

Helen Hunt Jackson said : "I do not think 
we have a right to withhold from the world a 
word or a thought, any more than a deed, which 
might help a single soul." Perhaps I, too, 
have no right to withhold from others what I 
have brought to the surface from deep sea 
soundings. The fact that these results have 
enlightened me may be proof that they may 

274 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 275 

help to enlighten another; for does not Balzac 
say : "Nous allons de nous aux hommes, jamais 
des hommes a nous" ? 

2. 

It seems to me that I always come very late 
— two, three, four, sometimes ten years after 
publication — to every book worth reading 
"for keeps". A book is written, printed, criti- 
cized, lauded or condemned, and to me remains 
unknown, except for a review of it ; then, long 
afterwards, I turn the corner of a library alcove, 
for instance in this Island Athenaeum, and there 
it is holding out a hand to me and inviting me 
to enjoy it. 

This Athenaeum is a delightful place in which 
to browse, to read, to explore unknown coasts 
by way of books. I like its outside ; the great 
portico pillars remind me of the Acropolis at 
Athens. I like the inside and its seductive in- 
consequence. It is such a relief, after the cut- 
and-dried processes by which a book is obtained 
from any of the great libraries, to prefer a simple 
request : "I should like this book, please;" 



276 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

and it is yours, with a reassuring smile that it 
may continue yours by judicious renewal. 

There is one corner I call the "ancestral 
retreat" ; it is filled with charming old books on 
genealogy. They hobnob — reaching out a 
hand across a century, and more — with the 
latest "Life", "Letters", or "Discoveries". 

On a table near at hand are some wonderful 
maps by the United States Geological Survey of 
North Dakota between the Red River and the 
beginning of the Missouri plateau; the region 
is thickly strewn with bits of terminal moraines 
— which fact, in my thought of it, makes this 
other bit of island terminal moraine in the 
Atlantic akin to those far northern plains. 
A few steps aside and you find a revolving 
bookrack filled with readable delights. I dis- 
covered there one day "Coke of Norfolk and 
His Friends"; and after reading it decided 
that I knew more of the American War for 
Independence and of the England of the eigh- 
teenth century through that one book, than I 
had learned all my previous life from historical 
gleanings. 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 277 

On the walls may be seen the painting of a 
clipper ship under full sail, and not far away 
the benevolent portrait face of Lucretia Mott ; 
farther on a loan collection of Rembrandt 
prints. 

One nook is for foreign literature. A sign 
of the times is a small collection of books in 
Portuguese for the benefit of the foreign con- 
tingent in the population. 

There is no distinctive booky atmosphere 
about the Athenaeum ; it is a homey, cozy 
gathering-place for the intellectual life of the 
people of the island. I rarely visit it without 
anticipating some delightful find, and I am as 
rarely disappointed. A few months ago I 
came upon Maeterlinck's book, "The Treasure 
of the Humble ". It invited me to make ac- 
quaintance with it — intimate acquaintance ; 
and dipping into it then and there, suddenly I 
found that I was "sounding in the deep sea". 
I kept on paying out my line, and the lead 
finally touching bottom I brought to the surface 
what will be found to be the truth concerning 
true love. 



278 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

Here is Maeterlinck's word which, read with 
reverence, should enlighten a world. 

"When Fate sends forth the woman it has 
chosen for us — sends her forth from the fast- 
nesses of the great spiritual cities in which we, 
all unconsciously, dwell, and she awaits us at 
the crossing of the road we have to traverse 
when the hour has come — we are warned at 
the first glance. Some there are who attempt 
to force the hand of Fate. Wildly pressing 
down their eyelids, so as not to see that which 
had to be seen — struggling with all their puny 
strength against the electric force — they will 
contrive to cross the road and go towards 
another, sent thither but not for them. But 
strive as they may, they will not succeed in 
1 stirring up the dead waters that lie in the 
great tarn of the future'. Nothing will happen. 
The pure force will not descend from the heights 
and those wasted hours and kisses will never 
become part of the real hours and kisses of their 
lives." 

This is one of the results of deep sea soundings 
of Love which is Life. Examine it closely, 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 279 

put it under the microscope of experience, and 
we recognize it to be a great truth. And be- 
cause this truth is not recognized by all, in- 
terpreted by all, we find the confusion of stand- 
ards, the unhappiness, the misery of "Love's 
Wayfaring" — we see the very thongs which 
bind in the "Wayfaring of Love" that Burne- 
Jones has painted. 

Maeterlinck prefaces this with, "Of the true, 
predestined love alone, do I speak here." 

But to those who interpret correctly, to them 
is given to know the heights and the depths, 
the patience, the long-suffering of Love — its 
God-given strength to endure. 

How the millions of the Human Race toil 
for the sustenance of this Love that means 
Life ! The very thought warms the heart. 

3- 
My creed as a worker is very simple. It 
has few articles. There can be no real work of 
any kind without toil — which interpreted is 
perseverance, patience, endurance applied to 
daily and hourly tasks. 



280 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

Long ago I ceased to consider the mere 
amassing of riches by men for the sake of amass- 
ing them either true work or toil. It is what 
may be termed slavery, and consequent loss of 
true life in ignoble servitude. 

Work — toil — is man's greatest blessing, a 
blessing that makes mentally, bodily, spirit- 
ually for health, provided it be not continuous 
overwork. We have constantly before our eyes 
evidence of the fact that overwork kills, ex- 
cessive toil exhausts. But — it is better to die 
than to be idle ; better to succumb than to 
live supine. Better to have an ideal, a hope, a 
legitimate ambition and die in the attempt 
to realize that ideal, fulfil that hope, accom- 
plish what is aimed at, than to live in indolence, 
to live without effort, workless. 

Soldiers fall in the ranks ; men drop at their 
toil ; women sink beneath the load imposed on 
them or assumed of their own free will. This 
is the way of Life. 

And the way of Death ? — What is a better 
guidepost therein than these words of Auerbach : 
"Fertig sein ist der beginnende Tod," The 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 281 

meaning in free translation may read : We have 
entered already on the path of Death when 
there is no longer something for which we may 
work. Satiety is slow death. 

4- 

Once at a musical extravaganza, I was 
watching intently and with an uneasy feeling 
the girls in a chorus-ballet. There was no en- 
joyment for me in this, for I knew the encores 
had been too many and the dancers — using 
their breath in singing — would soon be ex- 
hausted with the repetition of their strenuous 
bodily exercise. Suddenly a girl, a thin, frail 
creature, fell forward out of the fictitiously 
joyous ranks — rigid. She was removed ; the 
dancing chorus closing up in front of her. It 
was death — there on the stage. The extrav- 
aganza went on, without life or spirit, it is true ; 
but men and women played their parts to the end. 

I have thought so often since of that frail 
young thing. She was supporting herself, and 
doubtless another. She was doing her duty. 
Like a good soldier she fell fighting in the 



282 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

ranks. Life had given her something — and 
Death gave her far, far more : it took her 
suddenly from all deadening power of lingering 
disease, from all prolonged misery of want, from 
all the hard, hard struggle for her daily bread, 
saved her, possibly, from a living death. 

I have thought, at times, one might indeed 
envy her. One woman, at least, honors her 
memory. 

5- 

I believe in Work of some kind for all. I 
believe that work should be so regulated that 
in an occupation which menaces health the 
hours should be very few, the shifts many, the 
wages large. 

A friend of mine worked as machinist in a 
machine shop until the iron filings hurt the 
delicate lung tissue and hemorrhage resulted. 
Rescued from that work, he found other and 
enjoys that to this day. 

6. 

I believe that no man should be asked to 
work more than eight hours a day — and that 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 283 

no man should be deprived of the privilege of work- 
ing twelve hours if so minded. I believe that 
children, despite the child-labor laws, — the aim 
of which is wholly laudable, but the regulation 
by them of child life not adapted to our present 
economical and educational conditions, — should 
be allowed a certain amount of work; should 
be permitted to begin to earn something at an 
early age. They are happier with the right 
amount of work ; they are unhappy without it. 

7- 

I fail to see that the toil which exhausts the 
body, mutilates it, or kills it, is so great a curse 
as the alcoholism that kills the body after ex- 
hausting it, wrecking the intellect, weakening 
the will, and inducing to crimes untold. 

8. 
I believe that no kind of toil should preclude 
the possibility of an education of the right kind. 
In making this statement, I acknowledge that 
education — as education is understood To- 
day — never yet produced character. Neither 



284 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

will work produce it ; but it will develop it. 
I do not hold education, as we are accustomed 
to define it, in such high esteem as many others. 

The heart actually teaches for this life better 
than books. Character makes for a better 
moral environment than mere "culture", so 
called. 

When we approach the problem of education 
— as it is understood at present — versus the 
toilers, we are, as a nation, "all at sea". Deep 
sea soundings are in order here. As for this 
generation, it has been experimented with along 
so many educational lines that the marvel is 
that it can produce another generation upon 
which to continue the experiment. 

9- 

In Miss Addams' book, which I have already 
mentioned, I was greatly interested in the ac- 
count of her visit to Tolstoy made in the hope 
that it might assure her that "Tolstoy's under- 
taking to do his daily share of the physical 
labor of the world, that labor which is 'so dis- 
proportionate to the unnourished strength' 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 285 

of those by whom it is ordinarily performed, 
had brought him peace !" 

Tolstoy was so great in his simplicity, so 
earnest in his interpretation of the ideal that 
regulated the latter part of his life, that to me 
he has been and will remain one of the most 
pathetic figures in sociological history. He 
failed to sound deep enough — but it was no 
fault of his. 

He struggled to be one with the toilers. He 
worked as a toiler. He strove to square his 
life by Christ's. He believed that only so — 
by his daily toil in the fields, by his simple fare 
— could soul and body be rightly nourished ; 
in simple fare, simple life, simple love of man- 
kind, strenuous physical labor showing itself 
in daily toil at the side of the peasant worker, 
could be found a panacea for the misery of 
life, a reconciliation of life with its glaring 
inconsistencies of social conditions. 

He failed to grasp this truth : Between the 
man who has and is not obliged to work for his 
daily bread, and the man who has not and must 
toil from day to day not knowing whence the 



286 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

next dollar is to come for the support of himself 
and those dependent on him unless he continue 
to work, work, and ever work, there is fixed an 
impassable gulf. It cannot be bridged by 
sympathy, by intuition, by aid given gener- 
ously in the true spirit of Christ. It is there ; 
and it cannot be bridged. 

Tolstoy could not rid himself of his past. 
He was born into a state of society in which it. 
was impossible for him to feel the pressure of 
poverty. No earnest and faithful attempt on 
his part could extract him from his inherited 
environment; no effort, however prolonged, 
eradicate from his mentality the knowledge 
that there was "always something on which to 
depend". Nor could he render himself wholly 
dependent on his daily toil for his daily bread. 

This man's awful spiritual struggle to counter- 
act his past and his inherited environment by a 
life of self-imposed toil is one of the present 
day's great tragedies. Struggle as he might, 
he could not bridge that abyss. It is no wonder 
Miss Addams failed to find what she so earnestly 
sought. 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 287 

Personally, I have always felt that if Tolstoy 
with that earnestness of spirit that flamed with 
the intensity of an apostle's zeal could have 
accepted his past and present and used the 
great gift of his intellect, the flame of his spirit, 
the infinite pity and love of his heart, the great 
power of his life experience, in giving to the 
world more of the masterpieces like those for 
which we are so deeply indebted to him, the 
world would have been enriched, taught, helped 
to a degree that his attempt to make himself 
one with the toilers fell far short of. 

Like his Levin, in "Anna Karenina", his 

lead failed to sound the depths of existence, 

but not through any lack of earnest, yes, tragic 

effort on his part. It was his fate to have been 

born as he was. That fate produced a thinker 

who saw in physical toil alone the salvation of 

man. 

10. 

Evolution in all its phases that come before 
our eyes is most interesting, entertaining. 

I remember that at the Columbian Exposition 
in Chicago I spent an hour most profitably, 



288 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

most entertainingly, with numerous examples of 
the process of evolution of the locomotive. 
Later I found in the ethnological section what 
might be labelled "The process of evolution as 
shown in the skull of man". There were the 
skulls of the various races at various periods, 
and the skull of prehistoric man. Accompany- 
ing these was, of course, the skull of a man- 
ape, perhaps of Borneo ! 

In Boston a few months ago, I was watching 
the entrance of one of the great driving machines 
of the present day — a locomotive of the New 
York Limited — into the South Station. I 
stood on the platform for a moment looking 
at the behemoth. In appearance it was as far 
removed from the latest in that line at the 
Columbian Exposition as that was removed from 
the little wood engine and the train of coaches 
of 183 1. 

I looked up at the monster breathing heavily 
above me and said to myself: "Well, it's just 
steam after all — the pulse of this machine — no 
matter what the change of form, as the instru- 
ment of this steam power, induced by change 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 289 

of environment and railroad conditions. This 
machine is the final form of the adaptation of 
steam to locomotives. But it is the same 
steam, the same power that propels it through 
all its changes in form. Steam it is and steam 
it has always been, despite the evolution of the 
instrument into this ' No — ' towering above me." 
This is precisely how I felt about those skulls : 

— flat foreheads, pointed foreheads, full fore- 
heads, low foreheads, acute facial angles, obtuse 
facial angles, or no angles at all practically, 
flattened occiput, protruding occiput, receding 
jaw, protruding jaw — h'm ! 

I said to myself: "These were men animated 
by the spirit of man. The machine adapted 
itself to this, that, or the other environment 

— had to — but the spirit of man, which makes 
him a man, remains throughout all changes of 
form the same spirit of man." 

This thought was a positive comfort to me, 
and no process of evolution has ever appalled 
me since that day, only interested, instructed, 
entertained. Evolution has been at work — 
always, — that is all we can say to designate un- 



290 FROM AN ISUAND OUTPOST 

recorded time, — at work before any law for- 
mulated it ; and the formulating of the law can- 
not change its working or the lines along which 
it works. This is another comfort. 

As for the man-ape of Borneo — I have my 
own theory in regard to his skull and himself. 
It is abstruse, I confess ; and I dare not submit 
it to scientists. Not for fear of being laughed 
at ! Oh, no ; but because I truly believe that 
they never have taken such intuitive deep sea 
soundings in this special latitude and longitude 
on the ocean of evolution as have I. (And, 
of course, no scientist ever does take an "intuitive 
sounding" !) This must read and sound rightly 
audacious. I realize it — none better ; but, 
after all, any one is at liberty to have a little 
private theory of one's own about anything 
on the earth or in the heavens. I have very 
few theories about things in general, but I have 
a decided one for this special subject. 

ii. 

And because evolution is held accountable 
for almost all that takes place nowadays, it 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 291 

delights me to know that, as a process, in one 
instance, at least, it is completely balked ; it 
"fails to work" in this case of the spirit of man. 

Along certain lines there is no such process. 

For instance : I say to some boys who are 
having recess in the house, on account of a stormy 
day, and are ranged one behind the other play- 
ing tug-of-war to the detriment of knickerbockers 
and jacket belts — the smallest boy, of course, 
at the head of the "tug": — "Boys, if you 
don't keep your line away from that glass door 
in the corridor some of you will go through it." 

Now those boys really have a good deal of 
faith in me. They know I wish them well ; 
that what I say is probably the truth, — if 
they think at all about it which is doubtful, — 
for in their boys' way they have tested me and 
found that I am truthful with them. But, 
acknowledging all this, subconsciously perhaps, 
they shout as one: "Oh, no, we won't — we'll 
be careful !" ("Careful" and a boy !) 

In a few minutes there is a tremendous crash. 
Some frightened boys appear bringing with them 
another boy — of course the smallest at the 



2Q2 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

head of the "tug" — with the feeble explanation 
that "a fellow let go too soon". As a result 
the small boy's head was propelled by sheer 
momentum through that glass door. 

Fortunately the jugular vein is not severed, 
but I have the doubtful task of picking out fine 
splinters of glass from the scalp of a closely 
cropped small head. 

When he feels better — not so "wobbly" — 
he tries to explain to me that he went through 
"head on". Perhaps he thinks I need enlight- 
enment ! 

Would there be any use in my saying after 
this, "I told you so" ? 

A physician says to a man : "If you begin 
with that drug you will acquire the habit and 
such and such will be the result." But the man 
trusts to his own power of resistance ; he says : 
"Oh, no; it sha'n't get the better of me. I'll 
be careful." 

But the habit is formed before he realizes it 
and his power of resistance is not sufficient to 
overcome it. No one has yet defined the safety 
line for the making of a bad habit. In course 



DEEP SEA SOUNDINGS 293 

of time the result justifies the physician's 
warning. 

A father says to a son : " If you do so and so, 
if you abuse your health, if you make such and 
such experiments with life, so and so will happen 
— not to your benefit. / have found this out 
by bitter experience. Profit by my experience; 
be warned in time." 

But the son says to himself : " I am I ; father 
is father. I can do what he couldn't. Each is 
a law unto himself;" and goes his way irrespec- 
tive of parental warning. 

These cases can be multiplied with the multi- 
plier of the human race. So far as we have 
record of men's lives we find no tendency for 
one man to learn of another and more expe- 
rienced, so far as his individual experiment with 
life is concerned. Generation after generation 
begins on the footing of the first generation of 
men. Evolution is not in evidence. 

In the face of experience of a hundred 
generations, the man of To-day decides that he 
is able to make his own experiment with life 
although he is warned of certain shipwreck. 



294 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

He will not believe in that shipwreck until he 
experiences it ; then he desires to warn another, 
a younger. But that other also exercises his 
prerogative of individual experience, and in 
time they both cling to the same life-raft. 

It seems that it is just here that the spirit 
of man, the soul of man, of each individual, 
stands apart from every other of the race. It 
will do its best to work with the machine with 
which it is supplied and with which it must 
perform its work, if at all. The machine may 
change, may be obliged to adapt itself to new 
environment ; but the spirit of man remains the 
same. It begins and ends in itself. 



XX 



BEACONS 



I. 

On the wall of my bedroom I may see at any 
hour, at any minute of a dark, clear, moonless 
night, the reflection of the wax and wane of the 
great beacon light seven miles across the moors 
on Sankaty Head. 

The first time I was aware of this, I came to 
the conclusion that it was some optical illusion ; 
perhaps an extra blood pressure on the optic 
nerve, or that curious effect we may sometimes 
note, when the eyes are closed, of strange, 
running, colored gleams of purple and yellow 
lights apparently crossing the retina and retir- 
ing from sight somewhere above the left ear. 
But, investigating shortly, I found it was 
merely the reflection of the great light on San- 
katy Head. 

295 



296 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

In the moonlight this beacon shines as Capella 
shines in a clear, dark winter's night when it 
mirrors itself in the harbor waters. Its light is 
visible to the mariner forty miles at sea. At 
times, in exceptional gales, the flying spume dims 
it. In fog it is obscured. But even when I 
cannot see it, / know it is always there. 

2. 

It would be a matter of amazement if some 
were to ask, — and in all probability the ques- 
tion might be put to me, "How do you know it 
is always there ? What proof have you if you 
cannot see it in fog or heavy storm ?" 

I make answer : "Simply because I know it 
is there." 

"But that is no reason," says one. 

I reply that I know it is there because night 
after night I have seen it there ; because I have 
faith to believe it there, having seen it so many 
times." 

"But that is no reason," a second makes 
objection; "your faith does not prove it." 

Now, what answer shall be made to this ? 



BEACONS 297 

If I say : "If you will take sloop, or schooner, 
or tug, and in snow and sleet, in the teeth of a 
sixty-mile-an-hour gale contrive to double Great 
Point, work along past Great Round Shoal 
and get under the lee of Sankaty, or if you will 
cross the moors in the face of the blizzard till 
you actually reach the light, you will find it 
there. Make your own experiment;" they will 
protest : — 

"But that is impossible. You know per- 
fectly well we could not make that journey by 
land or sea without guide and compass, or 
even with them in such a storm. We should 
be exhausted ; we should perish." 

"Well," I conclude, "then if you were to 
attempt it you would perish ; but the light would 
be there for all your perishing. And what you 
assert is no argument against my faith in the 
keeper's trustworthiness." 

3- 

This ocean that I see from my windows was 
uncharted when Columbus set sail on it. 
But he had the stars, a compass that varied — 



298 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

and faith. With these he went forth on unknown 
seas — and finally gave to us our country. 

An astronomer of the present day might be 
able to prove to Columbus that the star by 
which he guided his little caravel was not there ; 
that it had been dispersed in star dust aeons before 
the Santa Maria's keel ploughed the unknown 
ocean ; that what he saw was but the simulacrum 
of the star — the light of it merely whfch was 
travelling for millions of years after the disper- 
sion of the star to reach the discoverer's eye. 

I can fancy Columbus' look of amazement 
after having given to his sovereigns a new world 
to hear that he was guided thereto by a simu- 
lacrum of a star. In imagination I hear his 
answer in no uncertain tone : 

"The light was there, star or no star. I 
saw it ; by it I steered my caravels. Behold 
the result !" 

This is the test : "Behold the result." 

4- 

It is a curious fact, I am told, that to man 
alone among animals belongs the inspiratory 



BEACONS 299 

cry. There was breathed "into his nostrils 
the breath of life ; and man became a living 
soul." 

And here is its corollary : "Then shall the 
dust return to the earth as it was ; and the spirit 
shall return unto God who gave it." 

Here we have the Human case : Birth — 
Death ; the spirit given from a source and the 
spirit returning to that source — inspiratory 
cry, expiratory sigh. Between the two, man 
pilgrimages from Infinity to Infinity. Faith is 
the sustenance of the spirit on this journey as 
food is the sustenance for the body. 

5- 
"But where begin with faith ? What beacon 
can guide us ?" 

The answer is very simple : Begin with the 
child. 

"But how begin ? We are at sea." 
Again the answer is simple : Begin by teach- 
ing the child faith in God as his Creator. 

"But if we do not have the faith to teach ?" 
Then do not teach the child. Take to gar- 



300 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

dening where you have faith that a seed, which 
you, nor I, nor any human can animate, once 
put into good ground and tended by you will 
sprout and thrive. Take to cooking where you 
make bread irrespective of your ignorance of 
how to animate the kernel of wheat that it 
may grow and produce the flour of which you 
seem perfectly willing to make your bread — 
and eat of it as well. Take to "clerking", to 
stenography, to weaving, spinning, hoeing, even 
— but leave the teaching of a child to some one 
who has faith and is not afraid to confess it. 

6. 

Mr. Peter Roberts in his exhaustive studies 
of the "Anthracite Coal Industry" and the 
"Anthracite Coal Communities" writes in con- 
clusion : 

"If society is to be saved, the regenerating 
power can only come from the moral-spiritual 
nature of man, and every force, either in society 
or industry, which grinds the altars of a nation 
will ultimately grind to powder the foundations 
upon which society rests." 



BEACONS 301 

One altar of our nation was broken, at least, 
when in this generation the simple petition, 
"Our Father", was made not obligatory in the 
common schools. 

The impressions received in childhood, the 
habits formed, in the majority of cases persist 
through life ; it is the way of the plant, the way 
of the sapling. No nation can afford to ignore 
this fact : That its children are the hope of its 
strength. This fact is both spiritual and eco- 
nomical. 

In our common schools the children are 
taught to salute the flag ; it is made for them a 
symbol of their country. The government that 
should lay an embargo on this teaching would 
prove unfaithful to its great trust. 

I hold that it is just as unfaithful to a greater 
trust — greater because universally human, not 
merely national — when it attempts to educate 
the child and at the same time omits to teach 
him reverence for his Creator. 

"But the majority of children have some 
religious instruction. Does not this fill the 
need?" 



302 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

By no means. For I am not considering 
" religious instruction" of any kind as we under- 
stand it. Religious instruction, so called, given 
once or twice a week does not meet the need of 
this special case or apply to it. 

Between the hours of 9 and 12 a.m. the mind 
of the child is freshest, most impressionable. 
That mind expands like a plant to imbibe in- 
fluences. The delicate brain-films, after sleep, 
are most sensitive to impressions. The child 
does his best work between these hours ; atten- 
tion fixes itself with less strain ; interest is roused 
with less effort ; mischief is not so rampant 
as during the afternoon session. In these three 
precious hours not only should the child's mind 
be fed but its soul. The soul-feelers are at work 
seeking spiritual food. When they are given 
nothing, they turn inward on themselves, fam- 
ished in part. 

The child comes out of the fresh air, perhaps 
sunshine, rain or snow — all true delights to a 
healthy child — to enter into confinement for 
three hours, with thirty or forty other children, 
between four walls darkened by blackboards, 



BEACONS 303 

and into an environment foreign to his thoughts. 
During these three hours certain habits are in 
the process of formation ; the intellect is sup- 
posed to be quickened, and is in most cases ; 
the soul — that is not provided for. Now the 
soul of a child is as constantly with him and a 
part of him as his brain — and needs as much 
sustenance, if not more. There are various 
ways of providing it which it is not my province 
to touch upon except in this one case. 

Upon each daily entrance into this foreign 
environment for a child's thoughts, let there 
be made the simple petition, "Our Father". 
Let that be the first English learned by the 
millions of our foreign child population. This 
is no special instruction in any "religion" — 
this simple acknowledgment of a Creator; 
but it teaches as nothing else can teach. Those 
few minutes of reverent silence when listening 
to the spoken words, or the reverential habit 
that is formed by daily repetition of those few 
words, makes for a certain attitude of mind 
impossible without it. It is as simple as lift- 
ing the cap in the presence of the flag, or rising 



304 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

when the Star-Spangled Banner is played. 
But its symbolism sounds far deeper depths 

— the soul of the child. 

Lessing, that great believing unbeliever says : 
"We can be unfaithful to a national god, but 
never to the true God when once we shall have 
known him." But He must be made known. 

This is no matter of creed, doctrine, or reli- 
gion as we understand that word — that atti- 
tude would now be called "antiquated"; it 
is a matter of forming in the child a habit of 
faith. It is a matter of giving regularly — as 
the breaking of fast of a morning is observed 

— to the child what the child spiritually, but 
unconsciously, needs to start his day. 

7- 

This is no theory upon which I draw to illus- 
trate; I draw upon experience. 

For a few years I taught in a school, for both 
boys and girls, where it really seemed a matter 
of lese-majeste to name the Name. The curric- 
ulum of the school was made on the basis of 
science-teaching. As the chiefs failed to recon- 



BEACONS 305 

cile science with what that Name implies, all 
mention of the Name was considered taboo. 
Yet in all my experience I have never witnessed 
more earnest, more conscientious work for 
the children's sake. It was beyond criticism. 

It was a curious position in which to find one's 
self. Dealing daily with childish hearts, child- 
ish brains, children's souls, I discovered the 
fact that I was failing all along the lines of 
instruction when I could not freely refer to the 
Creator of all created things. 

At that time psychology was to the fore; 
and I at once began that study in the hope that 
it might aiford me help with my teaching; 
perhaps prove a substitute for what I was ex- 
pected to omit in my work. Beginning with 
Mr. James' "Psychology", I have finally fin- 
ished all study in that direction with an attempt 
at Professor Miinsterberg's "Psychotherapy". 
This endeavor covers a period of nearly twenty 
years. I honestly and earnestly tried to solve 
the problem presented to me daily by these 
twenty-seven children — my special class — by 
placing myself in the position of a willing and 



306 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

humble disciple of men who knew far, far more 
than I could ever attain to; whose knowledge 
of psychology and its handmaid physiology was 
profound. 

But in Mr. James' words : "It did not work. " 
I discovered that in a certain direction I 
knew more of a child's soul by daily contact 
with the child along certain lines of instruction 
than anything Mr. James might intimate. 
This is not arrogance of knowledge ; it is said 
humbly, because I looked from my own soul into 
the child's and what I found there contradicted 
many of his theories. 

I found I was dealing with some spiritual 
facts that had escaped his keen analysis and 
theoretical excursiveness. Indeed, I came to 
the conclusion that, if I may be permitted the 
word, he was "floundering" spiritually. I speak 
only for myself ; I could find no anchorage with 
his deductions. 

8. 

What was I to do when one day a girl of 
twelve, with all my sex's inconsequence, and 
apropos of nothing — or so it seemed to me — 



BEACONS 307 

I think we were at work on some clay relief 
maps of South America — said suddenly : 

"I want to believe the Bible is true, but I 
can t. 

Poor mite ! I knew she must have heard 
some discussion at home ; or possibly the mak- 
ing of the relief in clay, and association of ideas 
had brought her a thought of Genesis — I do 
not know. But this was her sudden statement. 

I could not ignore it — and we were not sup- 
posed to mention that Name. I was on the 
horns of a dilemma none the softest. But over 
against the soul of that child there was but 
one duty — to feed it, if in truth I could. 

As the class was listening for an answer, I 
spoke to all : "Children, how many of you 
had bread for breakfast this morning?" 

The hands went up as one. 

" Who made the bread ? " I permitted general 
answers when we were "off guard" as I used 
to call those precious minutes for a child when 
he can speak in class without raising a hand. 

I received various answers in which the names 
of certain cooks were distinguishable. 



308 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

"Of what is the bread made ?" All knew. 

"Of what is the wheat made ?" No answer; 
that called for enlightenment. 

I told them of the kernel of corn and the 
wheat. Then I sprang a question on them : 
"How is a grain of wheat made, now that I have 
told you of what it is made?" 

They could not tell — neither could I. I 
explained to them as simply as I could what 
chemical combination is, but I also explained 
that no man, try as he might, could combine 
those elements to make one grain of wheat or 
a kernel of corn ; nor could he, were it possible 
for him to combine these elements, make the 
combination grow. "Now," I said, "if a man 
does not make it grow, who does make it ?" 
There was a faint, timid answer here and there : 
"God." 

"Yes," I said with emphasis, "God the 
Creator." And with these words a great bur- 
den for those children's sake rolled from my 
soul. I spoke from absolute conviction — and 
they knew it. "And, Helen," I continued, 
speaking to the small girl who had made the 



BEACONS 309 

dispiriting statement, "would you not find it 
very unreasonable and foolish to refuse to eat 
bread because you cannot know just how it is 
made to grow, and because no one living or dead 
has been able to make it grow ?" 

"Yes." 

"And can you not trust God, who made us, 
for many of these things you cannot under- 
stand ? Do you refuse to breathe because you 
cannot see the air you breathe ?" 

Never, never shall I forget the flush of joy 
that illumined that sweet face as she said with 
a sigh : "Oh, I do see it now ; and I feel so much 
better." 

Dear child ! She could not know how or why 
she " felt better " ; but I knew: she had been 
fed, had been given a little food for her hungry 
little soul. And this instance is but one of 
many of which I have knowledge. 

After all my work in psychology I found that 
the soul of each child is different from the soul of 
every other child. On this rock of fact all my 
psychology went to pieces. Then I went down 
on my knees and asked for help over against the 



310 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 

soul of the child. . . . Perhaps it is needless 
to say that I handed in my resignation at the end 
of the year. 

9- 

God is not mocked. An old truth that is 
ever new. No man, or woman, who has not 
unwavering faith in his Creator should teach a 
child. No man, or woman, should teach science 
to a child who has not reconciled his faith with 
that science; who has not truly given both 
consent of the heart and assent of the intellect. 
No man, or woman, can be asked the question 
by a child : "Who made a star ? Who made this 
egg ? Who made this butterfly ? Who made 
me, and how?" — and stand for a moment 
in the searchlight of that child's soul if he hesi- 
tate a second in his answer. We need science; 
but we need faith in a Creator to go hand and 
hand with it. 

And I would have children taught science from 
their earliest years — objectively, of course. 
Nothing so satisfies the inquiring mind, nothing 
so stimulates inquiry to effort along so many 
life-lines as such teaching — 



BEACONS 311 

But if I begin on this most interesting matter 
I shall overrun my manuscript ; indeed, I fear 
that I have already. 

The need of clear vision in this matter of the 
child's education was never so pressing as in 
this industrial age. We are in a transition 
state ; all sorts of forms along this special line 
are being evolved in our endeavors to adjust 
ourselves to a changed environment. This 
multiplicity of forms confuses, discourages, 
because of unsatisfactory results. It obscures 
the main object, the great beacon for this our 
Twentieth Century and all future centuries : 
The work that works in faith and hope. What 
a beacon light this is ! 

We must work in hope and teach others to 
work in hope ; we must live in faith, while we 
work in hope, and inspire faith in others ; but 
to do this we must make conditions such that 
educationally, industrially, economically, spirit- 
ually, men and women, yes, and little children, 
shall be enabled to work in hope — shall live in 
faith. 

I see no other salvation for our Human Race. 



3 i2 FROM AN ISLAND OUTPOST 



10. 
February 9, 1914. 

The sunset was very fine to-night. I like to 
see it in the east by reflected light; the effect 
is wonderfully beautiful. The waters of the 
harbor were heaving in the strong wind ; they 
were dark green. The shores of Monomoy and 
Shimmo were pale yellow and black in the 
level light ; one long, dark band behind 
them marked the plantation of dwarfed pines. 
The great sand dune of Pocomo Head gleamed 
deep orange in the strong rays of the setting 
sun. The shadows on the gray chimneys were 
sharply defined. Above, in a sky partly filled 
with heavy drifting clouds, the full moon was 
shining faintly. 

At the moment of sunset the great Sankaty 
Beacon twinkled across the moors. As dusk 
fell, the moon, shining from behind the dark, 
drifting clouds, silvered a portion of the harbor 
waters. A little light shone out here and 
there in the houses below the "Bank" and 
in the fishermen's huts on the shore — small 



BEACONS 313 

coastwise beacons. Brant Point gleamed on 
the left ; and far away on Great Point the third 
light on this Island Outpost in the Atlantic 
signalled across the Sound to Monomoy on the 
Cape. 



